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LETTERS OF TRAVEL 



Books by Rudyard Kipling 


Actions and Reactions 


Light That Failed, The 


Brushwood Boy, The 


Many Inventions 


Captains Courageous 


Naulahka, The (With 


Collected Verse 


Wolcott Balestier) 


Day's Work, The 


Plain Tales From the 


Departmental Ditties 


Hills 


and Ballads and Bar- 


Puck of Poor's Hill 


rack-Room Ballads 


Rewards and Fairies 


Diversity of Creat- 


Sea Warfare 


ures, A 


Seven Seas, The 


Eyes of Asia, The 


Soldier Stories 


Five Nations, The 


Soldiers Three, The 


France at War 


Story of the Gadsbys, 


From Sea to Sea 


and In Black and 


History of England, A 


White 


Jungle Book, The 
Jungle Book, Second 


Song of the English, A 


Songs from Books 


Just So Song Book 


Stalky & Co. 


Just So Stories 


They 


Kim 

Kipling Stories and 


Traffics and Discover- 


Poems Every Child 


ies 


Should Know 


Under the Deodars, 


Kipling Birthday Book, 


The Phantom 'Rick- 


The 


shaw, and Wee Willie 


Life's Handicap: Being 


Winkie 


Stories of Mine Own 


With the Night Mail 


People 


Years Between, The 



LETTERS OF 
TRAVEL 

i 892-1913 

By Rudyard Kipling 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1920 



<Lo-4^A "&- 



COPYRIGHT, 1892, 1 goo, 1908, 1914, 1920, BY 

RUDYARD KIPLING 

ALL BIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 

INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



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©CI.A570! 



PAGE 



CONTENTS 

From Tideway to Tideway (1892) — 

In Sight of Monadnock 3 

Across a Continent 17 

The Edge of the East 35 

Our Overseas Men 50 

Some Earthquakes 63 

Half-a-Dozen Pictures 75 

"Captains Courageous" 84 

On One Side Only 95 

Leaves from a Winter Note-Book .... 108 

Letters to the Family (1907) — 

The Road to Quebec 127 

A People at Home 138 

Cities and Spaces 148 

Newspapers and Democracy 160 

Labour 172 

The Fortunate Towns 184 

Mountains and the Pacific 197 

A Conclusion 210 

v 



vi CONTENTS 

Egypt of the Magicians (1913) — 

PAGB 

Sea Travel 223 

A Return to the East ..♦.*..• 234 

A Serpent of Old Nile 245 

Up the River 255 

Dead Kings 268 

The Face of the Desert 280 

The Riddle of Empire 290 



FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

1892-95 

In Sight of Monadnock. 

Across a Continent. 

The Edge of the East. 

Our Overseas Men. 

Some Earthquakes. 

Half-a-Dozen Pictures. 

"Captains Courageous." 

On One Side Only. 

Leaves from a Winter Note-Book. 



In Sight of Monadnock 

After the gloom of gray Atlantic weather, our 
ship came to America in a flood of winter sunshine 
that made unaccustomed eyelids blink, and the 
New Yorker, who is nothing if not modest, said, 
"This isn't a sample of our really fine days; wait 
until such and such times come, or go to such and 
such a quarter of the city." We were content, and 
more than content, to drift aimlessly up and down 
the brilliant streets, wondering a little why the 
finest light should be wasted on the worst pavements 
in the world; to walk round and round Madison 
Square, because that was full of beautifully dressed 
babies playing counting-out games, or to gaze 
reverently at the broad-shouldered, pug-nosed Irish 
New York policemen. Wherever we went there was 
the sun, lavish and unstinted, working nine hours a 
day, with the colour and the clean-cut lines of 
perspective that he makes. That any one should 
dare to call this climate muggy, yea, even "sub- 
tropical," was a shock. There came such a man, 
and he said, "Go north if you want weather — 
weather that is weather. Go to New England." 
So New York passed away upon a sunny afternoon, 

3 



4 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

with her roar and rattle, her complex smells, her 
triply over-heated rooms, and much too energetic 
inhabitants, while the train went north to the lands 
where the snow lay. It came in one sweep — almost, 
it seemed, in one turn of the wheels — covering the 
winter-killed grass and turning the frozen ponds 
that looked so white under the shadow of lean 
trees, into pools of ink. 

As the light closed in, a little wooden town, white, 
cloaked, and dumb, slid past the windows, and the 
strong light of the car lamps fell upon a sleigh (the 
driver furred and muffled to his nose) turning the 
corner of a street. Now the sleigh of a picture-book, 
however well one knows it, is altogether different 
from the thing in real life, a means of conveyance at 
a journey's end; but it is well not to be over-curious 
in the matter, for the same American who has been 
telling you at length how he once followed a kilted 
Scots soldier from Chelsea to the Tower, out of pure 
wonder and curiosity at his bare knees and sporran, 
will laugh at your interest in " just a cutter." 

The staff of the train — surely the great American 
nation would be lost if deprived of the ennobling 
society of brakeman, conductor, Pullman-car con- 
ductor, negro porter, and newsboy — told pleasant 
tales, as they spread themselves at ease in the smok- 
ing compartments, of snowings up the line to 
Montreal, of desperate attacks — four engines to- 
gether and a snow-plough in front — on drifts thirty 



IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK 5 

feet high, and the pleasures of walking along the 
tops of goods waggons to brake a train, with the 
thermometer thirty below freezing. "It comes 
cheaper to kill men that way than to put air-brakes 
on freight cars," said the brakeman. 

Thirty below freezing! It was inconceivable till 
one stepped out into it at midnight, and the first 
shock of that clear, still air took away the breath as a 
plunge into sea-water does. A walrus sitting on a 
woolpack was our host in his sleigh, and he wrapped 
us in hairy goatskin coats, caps that came down over 
the ears, buffalo robes and blankets, and yet more 
buffalo robes till we, too, looked like walruses and 
moved almost as gracefully. The night was as 
keen as the edge of a newly-ground sword; breath 
froze on the coat lapels in snow; the nose became 
without sensation, and the eyes wept bitterly because 
the horses were in a hurry to get home; and whirling 
through air at zero brings tears. But for the jingle 
of the sleigh-bells the ride might have taken place in 
a dream, for there was no sound of hoofs upon the 
snow, the runners sighed a little now and again as 
they glided over an inequality, and all the sheeted 
hills round about were as dumb as death. Only the 
Connecticut River kept up its heart and a lane of 
black water through the packed ice; we could hear 
the stream worrying round the heels of its small 
bergs. Elsewhere there was nothing but snow 
under the moon — snow drifted to the level of the 



6 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

stone fences or curling over their tops in a lip of 
frosted silver; snow banked high on either side of the 
road, or lying heavy on the pines and the hemlocks 
in the woods, where the air seemed, by comparison, 
as warm as a conservatory. It was beautiful 
beyond expression, nature's boldest sketch in black 
and white, done with a Japanese disregard of per- 
spective, and daringly altered from time to time by 
the restless pencils of the moon. 

In the morning the other side of the picture was 
revealed in the colours of the sunlight. There was 
never a cloud in the sky that rested on the snow-line 
of the horizon as a sapphire on white velvet. Hills 
of pure white, or speckled and furred with woods, 
rose up above the solid white levels of the fields, and 
the sun rioted over their embroideries till the eyes 
ached. Here and there on the exposed slopes, the 
day's warmth — the thermometer was nearly forty 
degrees — and the night's cold had made a bald and 
shining crust upon the snow; but the most part was 
soft powdered stuff, ready to catch the light on 
a thousand crystals and multiply it sevenfold. 
Through this magnificence, and thinking nothing of 
it, a wood-sledge drawn by two shaggy red steers, the 
unbarked logs diamond-dusted with snow, shouldered 
down the road in a cloud of frosty breath. It is the 
mark of inexperience in this section of the country to 
confound a sleigh which you use for riding with the 
sledge that is devoted to heavy work; and it is, I 



IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK 7 

believe, a still greater sign of worthlessness to think 
that oxen are driven, as they are in most places, by 
scientific twisting of the tail. The driver with red 
mittens on his hands, felt overstockings that come up 
to his knees, and, perhaps, a silvery gray coon-skin 
coat on his back, walks beside, crying, "Gee, haw!" 
even as is written in American stories. And the 
speech of the driver explains many things in regard 
to the dialect story, which at its best is an infliction to 
many. Now that I have heard the long, unhurried 
drawl of Vermont, my wonder is, not that the New 
England tales should be printed in what, for the 
sake of argument, we will call English and its type, 
but rather that they should not have appeared in 
Swedish or Russian. Our alphabet is too limited. 
This part of the country belongs by laws unknown 
to the United States, but which obtain all the world 
over, to the New England story and the ladies who 
write it. You feel this in the air as soon as you see 
the white-painted wooden houses left out in the 
snow, the austere schoolhouse, and the people — the 
men of the farms, the women who work as hard as 
they with, it may be, less enjoyment of life — the 
other houses, well painted and quaintly roofed, that 
belong to Judge This, Lawyer That, and Banker 
Such an one; all powers in the metropolis of six 
thousand folk over there by the railway station. 
More acutely still, do you realise the atmosphere 
when you read in the local paper announcements 



8 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

of "chicken suppers" and "church sociables" to be 
given by such and such a denomination, sandwiched 
between paragraphs of genial and friendly interest, 
showing that the countryside live (and without slay- 
ing each other) on terms of terrifying intimacy. 

The folk of the old rock, the dwellers in the older 
houses, born and raised hereabouts, would not live 
out of the town for any consideration, and there are 
insane people from the South — men and women from 
Boston and the like — who actually build houses out 
in the open country, two, and even three miles from 
Main Street which is nearly 400 yards long, and the 
centre of life and population. With the strangers, 
more particularly if they do not buy their groceries "in 
the street," which means, and is, the town, the town 
has little to do; but it knows everything, and much 
more also, that goes on among them. Their dresses, 
their cattle, their views, the manners of their chil- 
dren, their manner towards their servants, and every 
other conceivable thing, is reported, digested, dis- 
cussed, and rediscussed up and down Main Street. 
Now, the wisdom of Vermont, not being at all times 
equal to grasping all the problems of everybody 
else's life with delicacy, sometimes makes pathetic 
mistakes, and the town is set by the ears. You will 
see, therefore, that towns of a certain size do not 
differ materially all the world over. The talk of the 
men of the farms is of their farms — purchase, 
mortgage, and sale, recorded rights, boundary 



IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK 9 

lines, and road-tax. It was in the middle of New 
Zealand, on the edge of the Wild Horse Plains, that I 
heard this talk last, when a man and his wife, twenty 
miles from the nearest neighbour, sat up half the 
night discussing just the same things that the men 
talked of in Main Street, Vermont, U. S. A. 

There is one man in the State who is much ex- 
ercised oyer this place. He is a farm-hand, raised in 
a hamlet fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest 
railway, and, greatly daring, he has wandered here. 
The bustle and turmoil of Main Street, the new 
glare of the electric lights and the five-storeyed brick 
business block, frighten and distress him much. 
He has taken service on a farm well away from these 
delirious delights, and, says he, "I've been offered 
#25 a month to work in a bakery at New York. 
But you don't get me to no New York. Fve seen 
this place an' it just scares me." His strength is in 
the drawing of hay and the feeding of cattle. Winter 
life on a farm does not mean the comparative idleness 
that is so much written of. Each hour seems to 
have its sixty minutes of work; for the cattle are 
housed and eat eternally; the colts must be turned 
out for their drink, and the ice broken for them if 
necessary; then ice must be stored for the summer 
use, and then the real work of hauling logs for fire- 
wood begins. New England depends for its fuel on 
the woods. The trees are "blazed" in the autumn 
just before the fall of the leaf, felled later, cut into 



io FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

four-foot lengths, and, as soon as the friendly snow 
makes sledging possible, drawn down to the wood- 
house. Afterwards the needs of the farm can be 
attended to, and a farm, like an arch, is never at 
rest. A little later will come maple-sugar time, 
when the stately maples are tapped as the sap begins 
to stir, and beringed with absurd little buckets (a 
cow being milked into a thimble gives some idea 
of the disproportion), which are emptied into 
cauldrons. Afterwards (this is the time of the 
"sugaring-off parties") you pour the boiled syrup 
into tins full of fresh snow, where it hardens, and 
you pretend to help and become very sticky and 
make love, boys and girls together. Even the in- 
troduction of patent sugar evaporators has not 
spoiled the love-making. 

There is a certain scarcity of men to make love 
with; not so much in towns which have their own 
manufactories and lie within a lover's Sabbath-day 
journey of New York, but in the farms and villages. 
The men have gone away — the young men are 
fighting fortune further West, and the women 
remain — remain for ever as women must. On the 
farms, when the children depart, the old man and 
the old woman strive to hold things together without 
help, and the woman's portion is work and monotony. 
Sometimes she goes mad to an extent which ap- 
preciably affects statistics and is put down in census 
reports. More often, let us hope, she dies. In the 



IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK n 

villages where the necessity for heavy work is not so 
urgent the women find consolation in the formation 
of literary clubs and circles, and so gather to them- 
selves a great deal of wisdom in their own way. 
That way is not altogether lovely. They desire 
facts and the knowledge that they are at a certain 
page in a German or an Italian book before a certain 
time, or that they have read the proper books in a 
proper way. At any rate, they have something to 
do that seems as if they were doing something. 
It has been said that the New England stories are 
cramped and narrow. Even a far-off view of the 
iron-bound life whence they are drawn justifies the 
author. You can carve a nut in a thousand different 
ways by reason of the hardness of the shell. 

Twenty or thirty miles across the hills, on the way 
to the Green Mountains, lie some finished chapters 
of pitiful stories — a few score abandoned farms, 
started in a lean land, held fiercely so long as there 
was any one to work them, and then left on the 
hill-sides. Beyond this desolation are woods where 
the bear and the deer still find peace, and some- 
times even the beaver forgets that he is persecuted 
and dares to build his lodge. These things were 
told me by a man who loved the woods for their 
own sake and not for the sake of slaughter — a quiet, 
slow-spoken man of the West, who came across the 
drifts on snow-shoes and refrained from laughing 
when I borrowed his foot-gear and tried to walk. 



12 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY; 

The gigantic lawn-tennis bats strung with hide are 
not easy to manoeuvre. If you forget to keep the 
long heels down and trailing in the snow you turn 
over and become as a man who falls into deep water 
with a life-belt tied to his ankles. If you lose your 
balance, do not attempt to recover it, but drop, 
half-sitting and half-kneeling, over as large an area 
as possible. When you have mastered the wolf- 
step, can slide one shoe above the other deftly, that 
is to say, the sensation of paddling over a ten-foot 
deep drift and taking short cuts by buried fences is 
worth the ankle-ache. The man from the West 
interpreted to me the signs on the snow, showed how 
a fox (this section of the country is full of foxes, and 
men shoot them because riding is impossible) leaves 
one kind of spoor, walking with circumspection as 
becomes a thief, and a dog, who has nothing to be 
ashamed of, but widens his four legs and plunges, 
another; how coons go to sleep for the winter and 
squirrels too, and how the deer on the Canada 
border trample down deep paths that are called 
yards and are caught there by inquisitive men with 
cameras, who hold them by their tails when the deer 
have blundered into deep snow, and so photograph 
their frightened dignity. He told me of people also — 
the manners and customs of New Englanders here, 
and how they blossom and develop in the Far West 
on the newer railway-lines, when matters come very 
nearly to civil war between rival companies racing 



IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK 13 

for the same canon; how there is a country not very 
far away called Caledonia, populated by the Scotch, 
who can give points to a New Englander in a bargain, 
and how these same Scotch-Americans by birth, 
name their townships still after the cities of their 
thrifty race. It was all as new and delightful as 
the steady " scrunch " of the snow-shoes and the 
dazzling silence of the hills. 

Beyond the very furthest range, where the pines 
turn to a faint blue haze against the one solitary 
peak — a real mountain and not a hill — showed like 
a gigantic thumbnail pointing heavenward. 

"And that's Monadnock," said the man from the 
West; "all the hills have Indian names. You left 
Wantastiquet on your right coming out of town." 

You know how it often happens that a word 
shuttles in and out of many years, waking all sorts 
of incongruous associations. I had met Monadnock 
on paper in a shameless parody of Emerson's style, 
before ever style or verse had interest for me. But 
the word stuck because of a rhyme, in which one 
was 

. . . crowned coeval 
With Monadnock's crest, 
And my wings extended 
Touch the East and West. 

Later the same word, pursued on the same principle 
as that blessed one Mesopotamia, led me to and 
through Emerson, up to his poem on the peak itself— 



i 4 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

the wise old giant "busy with his sky affairs/ 5 who 
makes us sane and sober and free from little things if 
we trust him. So Monadnock came to mean every- 
thing that was helpful, healing, and full of quiet, and 
when I saw him half across New Hampshire he did 
not fail. In that utter stillness a hemlock bough, 
overweighted with snow, came down a foot or two 
with a tired little sigh; the snow slid off and the 
little branch flew nodding back to its fellows. 

For the honour of Monadnock there was made 
that afternoon an image of snow of Gautama Buddha, 
something too squat and not altogether equal on 
both sides, but with an imperial and reposeful 
waist. He faced towards the mountain, and pres- 
ently some men in a wood-sledge came up the road 
and faced him. Now, the amazed comments of 
two Vermont farmers on the nature and properties 
of a swag-bellied god are worth hearing. They 
were not troubled about his race, for he was aggres- 
sively white; but rounded waists seem to be out of 
fashion in Vermont. At least, they said so, with 
rare and curious oaths. 

Next day all the idleness and trifling were drowned 
in a snowstorm that filled the hollows of the hills 
with whirling blue mist, bowed the branches of the 
woods till you ducked, but were powdered all the 
same when you drove through, and wiped out the 
sleighing tracks. Mother nature is beautifully tidy 
if you leave her alone. She rounded off every angle, 



IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK 15 

broke down every scarp, and tucked the white 
bedclothes, till not a wrinkle remained, up to the 
chins of the spruces and the hemlocks that would 
not go to sleep. 

"Now," said the man of the West, as we were 
driving to the station, and alas! to New York, "all 
my snow-tracks are gone; but when that snow melts, 
a week hence or a month hence, they'll all come up 
again and show where Fve been." 

"Curious idea, is it not? Imagine a murder 
committed in the lonely woods, a snowstorm that 
covers the tracks of the flying man before the 
avenger of blood has buried the body, and then, a 
week later, the withdrawal of the traitorous snow, 
revealing step by step the path Cain took — the six- 
inch dee-trail of his snow-shoes — each step a dark 
disk on the white till the very end. 

There is so much, so very much to write, if it 
were worth while about that queer little town by the 
railway station, with its life running, to all outward 
seeming, as smoothly as the hack-coupes on their 
sleigh mounting, and within disturbed by the hatreds 
and troubles and jealousies that vex the minds of all 
but the gods. For instance — no, it is better to 
remember the lesson Monadnock, and Emerson has 
said, "Zeus hates busy-bodies and people who do too 
much." 

That there are such folk, a long nasal drawl 
across Main Street attests. A farmer is unhitching 



16 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

his horses from a post opposite a store. He stands 
with the tie-rope in his hand and gives his opinion 
to his neighbour and the world generally — "But 
them there Andersons, they ain't got no notion of 
etikwette!" 



Across a Continent 

It is not easy to escape from a big city. An entire 
continent was waiting to be traversed, and, for that 
reason, we lingered in New York till the city felt so 
homelike that it seemed wrong to leave it. And 
further, the more one studied it, the more grotesquely 
bad it grew — bad in its paving, bad in its streets, bad 
in its street-police, and but for the kindness of the 
tides would be worse than bad in its sanitary ar- 
rangements. No one as yet has approached the 
management of New York in a proper spirit; that is 
to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of 
squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No 
one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long, 
narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent 
attacks against the spirit and majesty of the Great 
American People, and lead to angry comparisons. 
Yet, if all the streets of London were permanently 
up and all the lamps permanently down, this would 
not prevent the New York streets taken in a lump 
from being first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore, or 
kin te the approaches of a Zulu kraal. Gullies, 
holes, ruts, cobble-stones awry, kerbstones rising 
from two to six inches above the level of the slatternly 

17 



18 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

pavement; tram-lines from two to three inches 
above street levels; building materials scattered half 
across the street; lime, boards, cut stone, and ash 
barrels generally and generously everywhere; 
wheeled traffic taking its chances, dray versus 
brougham, at cross roads; sway-backed poles whittled 
and unpainted; drunken lamp-posts with twisted 
irons; and, lastly, a generous scatter of filth and 
more mixed stinks than the winter wind can carry 
away, are matters which can be considered quite 
apart from the "Spirit of Democracy" or "the 
future of this great and growing country." In any 
other land they would be held to represent slovenli- 
ness, sordidness, and want of capacity. Here it is 
explained, not once but many times, that they show 
the speed at which the city has grown and the 
enviable indifference of her citizens to matters of 
detail. One of these days, you are told, everything 
will be taken in hand and put straight. The un- 
virtuous rulers of the city will be swept away by 
a cyclone, or a tornado, or something big and 
booming, of popular indignation; everybody will 
unanimously elect the right man, who will justly 
earn the enormous salaries that are at present being 
paid to inadequate aliens for road sweepings, and 
all will be well. At the same time the lawlessness 
ingrained by governors among the governed during 
the last thirty, forty, or it may be fiftjr years; the 
brutal levity of the public conscience in regard to 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 19 

public duty; the toughening and suppling of public 
morals, and the reckless disregard for human life, 
bred by impotent laws and fostered by familiarity 
with needless accidents and criminal neglect, will 
miraculously disappear. If the laws of cause and 
effect that control even the freest people in the 
world say otherwise, so much the worse for the laws. 
America makes her own. Behind her stands the 
ghost of the most bloody war of the century caused 
in a peaceful land by long temporising with lawless- 
ness, by letting things slide, by shiftlessness and 
blind disregard for all save the material need of the 
hour, till the hour, long conceived and let alone, stood 
up full armed, and men said, "Here is an unforeseen 
crisis," and killed each other in the name of God for 
four years. 

In a heathen land the three things that are sup- 
posed to be the pillars of moderately decent govern- 
ment are regard for human life, justice criminal and 
civil, as far as it lies in man to do justice, and good 
roads. In this Christian city they think lightly of 
the first — their own papers, their own speech, and 
their own actions prove it; buy and sell the second 
at a price openly and without shame; and are, 
apparently, content to do without the third. One 
would almost expect racial sense of humour would 
stay them from expecting only praise — slab, lavish, 
and slavish — from the stranger within their gates. 
But they do not. If he holds his peace, they forge 



20 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

tributes to their own excellence which they put into 
his mouth, thereby treating their own land which 
they profess to honour as a quack treats his pills. 
If he speaks — but you shall see for yourselves what 
happens then. And they cannot see that by untruth 
and invective it is themselves alone that they injure. 
The blame of their city evils is not altogether 
with the gentlemen, chiefly of foreign extraction, 
who control the city. These find a people made to 
their hand — a lawless breed ready to wink at one 
evasion of the law if they themselves may profit 
by another, and in their rare leisure hours content 
to smile over the details of a clever fraud. Then, 
says the cultured American, "Give us time. Give 
us time, and we shall arrive." The otherwise 
American, who is aggressive, straightway proceeds 
to thrust a piece of half-hanged municipal botch- 
work under the nose of the alien as a sample of 
perfected effort. There is nothing more delightful 
than to sit for a strictly limited time with a child 
who tells you what he means to do when he is a man; 
but when that same child, loud-voiced, insistent, 
unblushingly eager for praise, but thin-skinned as 
the most morbid of hobbledehoys, stands about all 
your ways telling you the same story in the same 
voice, you begin to yearn for something made and 
finished — say Egypt and a completely dead mummy. 
It is neither seemly nor safe to hint that the govern- 
ment of the largest city in the States is a despotism 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 21 

of the alien by the alien for the alien, tempered with 
occasional insurrections of the decent folk. Only 
the Chinaman washes the dirty linen of other lands. 

St. Paul, Minnesota. 
Yes, it is very good to get away once more and 
pick up the old and ever fresh business of the vagrant, 
loafing through new towns, learned in the manners of 
dogs, babies, and perambulators half the world over, 
and tracking the seasons by the up-growth of flowers 
in stranger-people's gardens. St. Paul, standing at 
the barn-door of the Dakota and Minnesota granaries, 
is all things to all men except to Minneapolis, eleven 
miles away, whom she hates and by whom she is 
patronised. She calls herself the capital of the 
North-West, the new North-West, and her citizens 
wear, not only the tall silk hat of trade, but the soft 
slouch of the West. She talks in another tongue 
than the New Yorker, and — sure sign that we are 
far across the Continent — her papers argue with the 
San Francisco ones over rate wars and the competi- 
tion of railway companies. St. Paul has been 
established many years, and if one were reckless 
enough to go down to the business quarters one 
would hear all about her and more also. But the 
residential parts of the town are the crown of it, 
in common with scores of other cities; broad-crowned 
suburbs — using the word in the English sense — that 
make the stranger jealous. You get here what you 



22 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

do not get in the city — well-paved or asphalted 
roads, planted with trees, and trim side-walks, 
studded with houses of individuality, not boorishly 
fenced off from each other, but standing each on its 
plot of well-kept turf running down to the pavement. 
It is always Sunday in these streets of a morning. 
The cable-car has taken the men down town to 
business, the children are at school, and the big 
dogs, three and a third to each absent child, lie 
nosing the winter-killed grass and wondering when 
the shoots will make it possible for a gentleman to 
take his spring medicine. In the afternoon, the 
children on tricycles stagger up and down the 
asphalt with due proportion of big dogs at each 
wheel; the cable-cars coming up hill begin to drop 
the men each at his own door — the door of the 
house that he builded for himself (though the 
architect incited him to that vile little attic tower 
and useless loggia), and, naturally enough, twilight 
brings the lovers walking two by two along the 
very quiet ways. You can tell from the houses 
almost the exact period at which they were built, 
whether in the jig-saw days, when it behoved re- 
spectability to use unlovely turned rails and pierced 
gable-ends, or during the Colonial craze, which 
means white paint and fluted pillars, or in the latest 
domestic era, a most pleasant mixture, that is, of 
stained shingles, hooded dormer windows, cunning 
verandahs, and recessed doors. Seeing these things, 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 23 

one begins to understand why the Americans visiting 
England are impressed with the old and not with the 
new. He is not much more than a hundred years 
ahead of the English in design, comfort, and economy, 
and (this is most important) labour-saving appli- 
ances in his house. From Newport to San Diego 
you will find the same thing to-day. 

Last tribute of respect and admiration. One 
little brown house at the end of an avenue is shut- 
tered down, and a doctor's buggy stands before it. 
On the door a large blue and white label says — 
"Scarlet Fever." Oh, most excellent municipality 
of St. Paul! It is because of these little things, and 
not rowdying and racketing in public places, that a 
nation becomes great and free and honoured. In 
the cars to-night they will be talking wheat, girding 
at Minneapolis, and sneering at Duluth's demand for 
twenty feet of water from Duluth to the Atlantic — 
matters of no great moment compared with those 
streets and that label. 

A Day later. 
"Five days ago there wasn't a foot of earth to see. 
It was just naturally covered with snow," says the 
conductor standing in the rear car of the Great 
Northern train. He speaks as though the snow 
had hidden something priceless. Here is the view: 
One railway track and a line of staggering telegraph- 
poles ending in a dot and a blur on the horizon. To 



24 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

the left and right, a sweep as it were of the sea, one 
huge plain of corn-land waiting for the spring, dotted 
at rare intervals with wooden farmhouses, patent 
self-reapers and binders almost as big as the houses, 
ricks left over from last year's abundant harvest, and 
mottled here and there with black patches to show 
that the early ploughing had begun. The snow lies 
in a last few streaks and whirls by the track; from 
skyline to skyline is black loam and prairie grass so 
dead that it seems as though no one year's sun 
would waken it. This is the granary of the land 
where the farmer who bears the burdens of the 
State — and who, therefore, ascribes last year's 
bumper crop to the direct action of the M'Kinley 
Bill — has, also, to bear the ghastly monotony of 
earth and sky. He keeps his head, having many 
things to attend to, but his wife sometimes goes mad 
as the women do in Vermont. There is little variety 
in Nature's big wheat-field. They say that when the 
corn is in the ear the wind, chasing shadows across it 
for miles on miles, breeds as it were a vertigo in 
those who must look and cannot turn their eyes 
away. And they tell a nightmare story of a woman 
who lived with her husband for fourteen years at an 
army post in just such a land as this. Then they 
were transferred to West Point, among the hills over 
the Hudson, and she came to New York, but the 
terror of the tall houses grew upon her and grew till 
she went down with brain-fever, and the dread of her 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 25 

delirium was that the terrible things would topple 
down and crush her. That is a true story. 

They work for harvest with steam-ploughs here. 
How could mere horses face the endless furrows? 
And they attack the earth with tooth-cogged and 
spiked engines that would be monstrous in the shops, 
but here are only speckles on the yellow grass. Even 
the locomotive is cowed. A train of freight cars is 
passing along a line that comes out of the blue and 
goes on till it meets the blue again. Elsewhere the 
train would move off with a joyous, vibrant roar. 
Here it steals away down the vista of the telegraph- 
poles with an awed whisper — steals away and sinks 
into the soil. 

Then comes a town deep in black mud — a straggly, 
inch-thick plank town, with dull red grain elevators. 
The open country refuses to be subdued even for a 
few score rods. Each street ends in the illimitable 
open, and it is as though the whole houseless, outside 
earth were racing through it. Towards evening, 
under a gray sky, flies by an unframed picture of 
desolation. In the foreground a farm waggon almost 
axle deep in mud, the mire dripping from the slow 
turning wheels as the man flogs the horses. Behind 
him on a knoll of sodden soggy grass, fenced off by 
raw rails from the landscape at large, are a knot of 
utterly uninterested citizens who have flogged 
horses and raised wheat in their time, but to-day lie 
under chipped and weather-worn wooden head- 



26 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

stones. Surely burial here must be more awful to 
the newly made ghost than burial at sea! 

There is more snow as we go north, and Nature is 
hard at work breaking up the ground for the spring. 
The thaw has filled every depression with a sullen 
gray-black spate, and out on the levels the water 
lies six inches deep, in stretch upon stretch, as far as 
the eye can reach. Every culvert is full, and the 
broken ice clicks against the wooden pier-guards of 
the bridges. Somewhere in this flatness there is a 
refreshing jingle of spurs along the cars, and a man 
of the Canadian Mounted Police swaggers through 
with his black fur cap and yellow tab aside, his well- 
fitting overalls and his better set-up back. One 
wants to shake hands with him because he is clean 
and does not slouch nor spit, trims his hair, and 
walks as a man should. Then a custom-house 
officer wants to know too much about cigars, whisky, 
and Florida water. Her Majesty, the Queen of 
England and Empress of India has us in her keeping. 
Nothing has happened to the landscape, and Winni- 
peg, which is, as it were, a centre of distribution for 
emigrants, stands up to her knees in the water of the 
thaw. The year has turned in earnest, and some- 
body is talking about the " first ice-shove " at 
Montreal, 1300 or 1400 miles east. 

They will not run trains on Sunday at Montreal, 
and this is Wednesday. Therefore, the Canadian 
Pacific makes up a train for Vancouver at Winnipeg. 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 27 

This is worth remembering, because few people 
travel in that train, and you escape any rush of 
tourists running westward to catch the Yokohama 
boat. The car is your own, and with it the service of 
the porter. Our porter, seeing things were slack, 
beguiled himself with a guitar, which gave a tri- 
umphal and festive touch to the journey, ridiculously 
out of keeping with the view. For eight-and- 
twenty long hours did the bored locomotive trail us 
through a flat and hairy land, powdered, ribbed and 
speckled with snow, small snow that drives like dust 
shot in the wind — the land of Assiniboia. Now and 
again, for no obvious reason to the outside mind, 
there was a town. Then the towns gave place to 
"section so and so"; then there were trails of the 
buffalo, where he once walked in his pride; then there 
was a mound of white bones, supposed to belong to 
the said buffalo, and then the wilderness took up the 
tale. Some of it was good ground, but most of it 
seemed to have fallen by the wayside, and the tedium 
of it was eternal. 

At twilight — an unearthly sort of twilight — there 
came another curious picture. Thus — a wooden 
town shut in among low, treeless, rolling ground, a 
calling river that ran unseen between scarped banks; 
barracks of a detachment of mounted police, a little 
cemetery where ex-troopers rested, a painfully formal 
public garden with pebble paths and foot-high fir 
trees, a few lines of railway buildings, white women 



28 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

walking up and down in the bitter cold with their 
bonnets off, some Indians in red blanketing with 
buffalo horns for sale trailing along the platform, and, 
not ten yards from the track, a cinnamon bear and a 
young grizzly standing up with extended arms in 
their pens and begging for food. It was strange 
beyond anything that this bald telling can suggest — 
opening a door into a new world. The only common- 
place thing about the spot was its name — Medicine 
Hat, which struck me instantly as the only possible 
name such a town could carry. This is that place 
which later became a town; but I had seen it three 
years before when it was even smaller and was 
reached by me in a freight-car, ticket unpaid for. 
That next morning brought us the Canadian 
Pacific Railway as one reads about it. No pen of 
man could do justice to the scenery there. The 
guide-books struggle desperately with descriptions 
adapted for summer reading of rushing cascades, 
lichened rocks, waving pines, and snow-capped 
mountains; but in April these things are not there. 
The place is locked up — dead as a frozen corpse. 
The mountain torrent is a boss of palest emerald ice 
against the dazzle of the snow; the pine-stumps are 
capped and hooded with gigantic mushrooms of 
snow; the rocks are overlaid five feet deep; the rocks, 
the fallen trees, and the lichens together, and the 
dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in the side 
of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 29 

icicles. You may listen in vain when the train 
stops for the least sign of breath or power among the 
hills. The snow has smothered the rivers, and the 
great looping trestles run over what might be a 
lather of suds in a huge washtub. The old snow 
near by is blackened and smirched with the smoke of 
locomotives, and its dullness is grateful to aching 
eyes. But the men who live upon the line have no 
consideration for these things. At a halting-place 
in a gigantic gorge walled in by the snows, one of 
them reels from a tiny saloon into the middle of the 
track where half-a-dozen dogs are chasing a pig off 
the metals. He is beautifully and eloquently drunk. 
He sings, waves his hands, and collapses behind a 
shunting engine, while four of the loveliest peaks 
that the Almighty ever moulded look down upon 
him. The landslide that should have wiped that 
saloon into kindlings has missed its mark and has 
struck a few miles down the line. One of the hill- 
sides moved a little in dreaming of the spring and 
caught a passing freight train. Our cars grind 
cautiously by, for the wrecking engine has only just 
come through. The deceased engine is standing on 
its head in soft earth thirty or forty feet down the 
slide, and two long cars loaded with shingles are 
dropped carelessly atop of it. It looks so marvel- 
lously like a toy train flung aside by a child, that one 
cannot realise what it means till a voice cries, "Any 
one killed?" The answer comes back, "No; all 



3 o FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

jumped "; and you perceive with a sense of personal 
insult that this slovenliness of the mountain is an 
affair which may touch your own sacred self. In 
which case . . . but the train is out on a 
trestle, into a tunnel, and out on a trestle again. It 
was here that every one began to despair of the 
line when it was under construction, because there 
seemed to be no outlet. But a man came, as a man 
always will, and put a descent thus and a curve in 
this manner, and a trestle so; and behold, the line 
went on. It is in this place that we heard the story 
of the Canadian Pacific Railway told as men tell a 
many times repeated tale, with exaggerations and 
omissions, but an imposing tale, none the less. In 
the beginning, when they would federate the Domin- 
ion of Canada, it was British Columbia who saw 
objections to coming in, and the Prime Minister of 
those days promised it for a bribe, an iron band 
between tidewater and tidewater that should not 
break. Then everybody laughed, which seems nec- 
essary to the health of most big enterprises, and 
while they were laughing, things were being done. 
The Canadian Pacific Railway was given a bit of a 
line here and a bit of a line there and almost as much 
land as it wanted, and the laughter was still going 
on when the last spike was driven between east and 
west, at the very place where the drunken man 
sprawled behind the engine, and the iron band ran 
from tideway to tideway as the Premier said, and 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 31 

people in England said "How interesting/' and 
proceeded to talk about the " bloated Army 
estimates." Incidentally, the man who told us — he 
had nothing to do with the Canadian Pacific Rail- 
way — explained how it paid the line to encourage 
immigration, and told of the arrival at Winnipeg of a 
train-load of Scotch crofters on a Sunday. They 
wanted to stop then and there for the Sabbath — they 
and all the little stock they had brought with them. 
It was the Winnipeg agent who had to go among 
them arguing (he was Scotch too, and they could not 
quite understand it) on the impropriety of dislocating 
the company's traffic. So their own minister held a 
service in the station, and the agent gave them a 
good dinner, cheering them in Gaelic, at which they 
wept, and they went on to settle at Moosomin, where 
they lived happily ever afterwards. Of the man- 
ager, the head of the line from Montreal to Van- 
couver, our companion spoke with reverence that 
was almost awe. That manager lived in a palace at 
Montreal, but from time to time he would sally 
forth in his special car and whirl over his 3000 miles 
at 50 miles an hour. The regulation pace is twenty- 
two, but he sells his neck with his head. Few 
drivers cared for the honour of taking him over the 
road. A mysterious man he was, who "carried the 
profile of the line in his head," and, more than that, 
knew intimately the possibilities of back country 
which he had never seen nor travelled over. There 



32 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

is always one such man on every line. You can 
hear similar tales from drivers on the Great Western 
in England or Eurasian stationmasters on the big 
North-Western in India. Then a fellow-traveller 
spoke, as many others had done, on the possibilities 
of Canadian union with the United States; and his 
language was not the language of Mr. Goldwin 
Smith. It was brutal in places. Summarised it 
came to a pronounced objection to having anything 
to do with a land rotten before it was ripe, a land 
with seven million negroes as yet unwelded into the 
population, their race-type unevolved, and rather 
more than crude notions on murder, marriage, and 
honesty. " We've picked up their way of politics/ 5 
he said mournfully. "That comes of living next 
door to them; but I don't think we're anxious to 
mix up with their other messes. They say they 
don't want us. They keep on saying it. There's a 
nigger on the fence somewhere, or they wouldn't lie 
about it." 

"But does it follow that they are lying?" 
"Sure. I've lived among 'em. They can't go 
straight. There's some dam' fraud at the back of 



It. 



From this belief he would not be shaken. He had 
lived among them — perhaps had been bested in 
trade. Let them keep themselves and their manners 
and customs to their own side of the line. 

This is very sad and chilling. It seemed quite 



ACROSS A CONTINENT 33 

otherwise in New York, where Canada was repre- 
sented as a ripe plum ready to fall into Uncle Sam's 
mouth when he should open it. The Canadian has 
no special love for England — the Mother of Colonies 
has a wonderful gift for alienating the affections of 
her own household by neglect — but, perhaps, he 
loves his own country. We ran out of the snow 
through mile upon mile of snow-sheds, braced w T ith 
twelve-inch beams, and planked with two-inch 
planking. In one place a snow slide had caught just 
the edge of a shed and scooped it away as a knife 
scoops cheese. High up the hills men had built 
diverting barriers to turn the drifts, but the drifts had 
swept over everything, and lay five deep on the 
top of the sheds. When we woke it was on the 
banks of the muddy Fraser River and the spring was 
hurrying to meet us. The snow had gone; the pink 
blossoms of the wild currant were open, the budding 
alders stood misty green against the blue black of the 
pines, the brambles on the burnt stumps were in 
tenderest leaf, and every moss on every stone was 
this year's work, fresh from the hand of the Maker. 
The land opened into clearings of soft black earth. 
At one station a hen had laid an egg and was telling 
the world about it. The world answered with a 
breath of real spring — spring that flooded the stuffy 
car and drove us out on the platform to snufF and 
sing and rejoice and pluck squashy green marsh- 
flags and throw them at the colts, and shout at the 



34 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

wild duck that rose from a jewel-green lakelet. 
God be thanked that in travel one can follow the 
year! This, my spring, I lost last November in 
New Zealand. Now I shall hold her fast through 
Japan and the summer into New Zealand again. 

Here are the waters of the Pacific, and Vancouver 
(completely destitute of any decent defences) grown 
out of all knowledge in the last three years. At the 
railway wharf, with never a gun to protect her, 
lies the Empress of India — the Japan boat — and 
what more auspicious name could you wish to find 
at the end of one of the strong chains of empire? 



The Edge of the East 

The mist was clearing off Yokohama harbour and a 
hundred junks had their sails hoisted for the morning 
breeze, so that the veiled horizon was stippled with 
square blurs of silver. An English man-of-war 
showed blue-white on the haze, so new was the 
daylight, and all the water lay out as smooth as the 
inside of an oyster shell. Two children in blue and 
white, their tanned limbs pink in the fresh air, 
sculled a marvellous boat of lemon-hued wood, and 
that was our fairy craft to the shore across the still- 
ness and the mother o' pearl levels. 

There are ways and ways of entering Japan. The 
best is to descend upon it from America and the 
Pacific — from the barbarians and the deep sea. 
Coming from the East, the blaze of India and the 
insolent tropical vegetation of Singapore dull the 
eye to half-colours and little tones. It is at Bombay 
that the smell of All Asia boards the ship miles off 
shore, and holds the passenger's nose till he is clear 
of Asia again. That is a violent and aggressive 
smell, apt to prejudice the stranger, but kin none the 
less to the gentle and insinuating flavour that stole 
across the light airs of the daybreak when the fairy 

25 



36 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

boat went to shore — a smell of very clean new 
wood; split bamboo, wood-smoke, damp earth, and 
the things that people who are not white people eat — 
a homelike and comforting smell. Then followed on 
shore the sound of an Eastern tongue, that is beauti- 
ful or not as you happen to know it. The Western 
races have many languages, but a crowd of Europeans 
heard through closed doors talk with the Western 
pitch and cadence. So it is with the East. A line 
of jinrickshaw coolies sat in the sun discoursing to 
each other, and it was as though they were welcom- 
ing a return in speech that the listener must know as 
well as English. They talked and they talked, but 
the ghosts of familiar words would not grow any 
clearer till presently the Smell came down the open 
streets again, saying that this was the East where 
nothing matters, and trifles old as the Tower of 
Babel mattered less than nothing, and that there 
were old acquaintances waiting at every corner 
beyond the township. Great is the Smell of the 
East! Railways, telegraphs, docks, and gun-boats 
cannot banish it, and it will endure till the railways 
are dead. He who has not smelt that smell has 
never lived. 

Three years ago Yokohama was sufficiently 
Europeanised in its shops to suit the worst and 
wickedest taste. To-day it is still worse if you keep 
to the town limits. Ten steps beyond into the 
fields all the civilisation stops exactly as it does in 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 37 

another land a few thousand miles further West. 
The globe-trotting millionaires, anxious to spend 
money, with a nose on whatever caught their liber- 
tine fancies, had explained to us aboard-ship that 
they came to Japan in haste, advised by their guide- 
books to do so, lest the land should be suddenly 
civilised between steamer-sailing and steamer-sailing. 
When they touched land they ran away to the 
curio shops to buy things which are prepared for 
them — mauve and magenta and blue vitriol things. 
By this time they have a "Murray" under one arm 
and an electric blue eagle with a copperas beak and 
a yellow "E pluribus unutn" embroidered on apple- 
green silk, under the other. 

We, being wise, sit in a garden that is not ours, 
but belongs to a gentleman in slate-coloured silk, 
who, solely for the sake of the picture, condescends 
to work as a gardener, in which employ he is sweeping 
delicately a welt of fallen cherry blossoms from 
under an azalea, aching to burst into bloom. Steep 
stone steps, of the colour that nature ripens through 
long winters, lead up to this garden by way of clumps 
of bamboo grass. You see the Smell was right 
when it talked of meeting old friends. Half-a- 
dozen blue-black pines are standing akimbo against 
a real sky — not a fog-blur nor a cloud-bank, nor a 
gray dish-clout wrapped round the sun — but a blue 
sky. A cherry tree on a slope below them throws up 
a wave of blossom that breaks all creamy white 



38 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

against their feet, and a clump of willow trail their 
palest green shoots in front of all. The sun sends 
for an ambassador through the azalea bushes a 
lordly swallow-tailed butterfly and his squire, very 
like the flitting "chalk-blue" of the English downs. 
The warmth of the East, that goes through, not over, 
the lazy body, is added to the light of the East — the 
splendid lavish light that clears but does not bewilder 
the eye. Then the new leaves of the spring wink 
like fat emeralds and the loaded branches of cherry- 
bloom grow transparent and glow as a hand glows 
held up against flame. Little, warm sighs come up 
from the moist, warm earth, and the fallen petals stir 
on the ground, turn over, and go to sleep again. 
Outside, beyond the foliage, where the sunlight lies 
on the slate-coloured roofs, the ridged rice-fields 
beyond the roofs, and the hills beyond the rice-fields, 
is all Japan — only all Japan; and this that they call 
the old French Legation is the Garden of Eden that 
most naturally dropped down here after the Fall. 
For some small hint of the beauties to be shown later 
there is the roof of a temple, ridged and fluted with 
dark tiles, flung out casually beyond the corner of the 
bluff on which the garden stands. Any other curve 
of the eaves would not have consorted with the 
sweep of the pine branches; therefore, this curve was 
made, and being made, was perfect. The congrega- 
tion of the globe-trotters are in the hotel, scuffling 
for guides, in order that they may be shown the 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 39 

sights of Japan, which is all one sight. They must 
go to Tokio, they must go to Nikko; they must 
surely see all that is to be seen, and then write home 
to their barbarian families that they are getting used 
to the sight of bare, brown legs. Before this day is 
ended, they will all, thank goodness, have splitting 
headaches and burnt-out eyes. It is better to lie 
still and hear the grass grow — to soak in the heat and 
the smell and the sounds and the sights that come 
unasked. 

Our garden overhangs the harbour, and by pushing 
aside one branch we look down upon a heavy- 
sterned fishing-boat, the straw-gold mats of the 
deck-house pushed back to show the perfect order 
and propriety of the housekeeping that is going 
forward. The father-fisher, sitting frog-fashion, is 
poking at a tiny box full of charcoal, and the light, 
white ash is blown back into the face of a largish 
Japanese doll, price two shillings and threepence in 
Bayswater. The doll wakes, turns into a Japanese 
baby something more valuable than money could 
buy — a baby with a shaven head and aimless legs. 
It crawls to the thing in the polished brown box, is 
picked up just as it is ready to eat live coals, and is 
set down behind a thwart, where it drums upon a 
bucket, addressing the firebox from afar. Half-a- 
dozen cherry blossoms slide off a bough, and waver 
down to the water close to the Japanese doll, who in 
another minute will be overside in pursuit of these 



4 o FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

miracles. The father-fisher has it by the pink hind 
leg, and this time it is tucked away, all but the top- 
knot, out of sight among umber nets and sepia 
cordage. Being an Oriental it makes no protest, 
and the boat scuds out to join the little fleet in the 
offing. 

Then two sailors of a man-of-war come along the 
sea face, lean over the canal below the garden, spit, 
and roll away. The sailor in port is the only superior 
man. To him all matters rare and curious are 
either "them things" or "them other things. " He 
does not hurry. himself, he does not seek adjectives 
other than those which custom puts into his mouth 
for all occasions; but the beauty of life penetrates his 
being insensibly till he gets drunk, falls foul of the 
local policeman, smites him into the nearest canal, 
and disposes of the question of treaty revision with a 
hiccup. All the same, Jack says that he has a 
grievance against the policeman, who is paid a dollar 
for every strayed seaman he brings up to the Consular 
Courts for overstaying his leave, and so forth. 
Jack says that the little fellows deliberately hinder 
him from getting back to his ship, and then with 
devilish art and craft of wrestling tricks — "there 
are about a hundred of 'em, and they can throw you 
with every qualified one" — carry him to justice. 
Now when Jack is softened with drink he does not 
tell lies. This is his grievance, and he says that 
them blanketed consuls ought to know. "They 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 41 

plays into each other's hands, and stops you at 
the Hatoba" — the policemen do. The visitor who 
is neither a seaman nor drunk, cannot swear to the 
truth of this, or indeed anything else. He moves 
not only among fascinating scenes and a lovely 
people but, as he is sure to find out before he has been 
a day ashore, between stormy questions. Three 
years ago there were no questions that were not 
going to be settled off-hand in a blaze of paper 
lanterns. The Constitution was new. It has a 
gray, pale cover with a chrysanthemum at the back, 
and a Japanese told me then, "Now we have Con- 
stitution same as other countries, and so it is all 
right. Now we are quite civilised because of Con- 



stitution." 



A perfectly irrelevant story comes to mind here. 
Do you know that in Madeira once they had a 
revolution which lasted just long enough for the 
national poet to compose a national anthem, and 
then was put down? All that is left of the revolt 
now is the song that you hear on the twangling 
nachettes, the baby-banjoes, of a moonlight night 
under the banana fronds at the back of Funchal. 
And the high-pitched nasal refrain of it is "Consti- 
tuci-ounl' 3 

Since that auspicious date it seems that the 
questions have impertinently come up, and the first 
and the last of them is that of Treaty Revision. 
Says the Japanese Government, "Only obey our 



42 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

laws, our new laws that we have carefully compiled 
from all the wisdom of the West, and you shall go 
up country as you please and trade where you will, 
instead of living cooped up in concessions and 
being judged by consuls. Treat us as you would 
treat France or Germany, and we will treat you as 
our own subjects." 

Here, as you know, the matter rests between the 
two thousand foreigners and the forty million 
Japanese — a God-send to all editors of Tokio and 
Yokohama, and the despair of the newly arrived in 
whose nose, remember, is the smell of the East, one 
and indivisible, Immemorial, Eternal, and, above all, 
instructive. 

Indeed, it is only by walking out at least half a 
mile that you escape from the aggressive evidences 
of civilisation, and come out into the rice-fields at the 
back of the town. Here men with twists of blue and 
white cloth round their heads are working knee deep 
in the thick black mud. The largest field may be 
something less than two tablecloths, while the 
smallest is, say, a speck of undercliff, on to which it 
were hard to back a 'rickshaw, wrested from the 
beach and growing its clump of barley within spray- 
shot of the waves. The field paths are the trodden 
tops of the irrigating cuts, and the main roads as 
wide as two perambulators abreast. From the 
uplands — the beautiful uplands planted in exactly 
the proper places with pine and maple — the ground 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 43 

comes down in terraced pocket on pocket of rich 
earth to the levels again, and it would seem that 
every heavily-thatched farmhouse was chosen with 
special regard to the view. If you look closely when 
the people go to work you will see that a household 
spreads itself over plots, maybe, a quarter of a mile 
apart. A revenue map of a village shows that this 
scatteration is apparently designed, but the reason is 
not given. One thing at least is certain. The 
assessment of these patches can be no light piece of 
work — just the thing, in fact, that would give em- 
ployment to a large number of small and variegated 
Government officials, any one of whom, assuming 
that he was of an Oriental cast of mind, might make 
the cultivator's life interesting. I remember now — 
a second-time-seen place brings back things that were 
altogether buried — seeing three years ago the pile of 
Government papers required in the case of one farm. 
They were many and systematic, but the interesting 
thing about them was the amount of work that they 
must have furnished to those who were neither 
cultivators nor Treasury officials. 

If one knew Japanese, one could collogue with that 
gentleman in the straw-hat and the blue loin-cloth 
who is chopping within a sixteenth of an inch of 
his naked toes with the father and mother of all 
weed-spuds. His version of local taxation might be 
inaccurate, but it would -surely be picturesque. 
Failing his evidence, be pleased to accept two or 



44 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

three things that may or may not be facts of general 
application. They differ in a measure from state- 
ments in the books. The present land-tax is nomi- 
nally 2§ per cent, payable in cash on a three, or as 
some say a five, yearly settlement. But, according 
to certain officials, there has been no settlement 
since 1875. Land lying fallow for a season pays the 
same tax as land in cultivation, unless it is unpro- 
ductive through flood or calamity (read earthquake 
here). The Government tax is calculated on the 
capital value of the land, taking a measure of about 
11,000 square feet or a quarter of an acre as the unit. 

Now, one of the ways of getting at the capital 
value of the land is to see what the railways have 
paid for it. The very best rice-land, taking the 
Japanese dollar at three shillings, is about £65:ios. 
per acre. Unirrigated land for vegetable growing 
is something over £9 :12s., and forest £2:1 is. As 
these are railway rates, they may be fairly held to 
cover large areas. In private sales the prices may 
reasonably be higher. 

It is to be remembered that some of the very best 
rice-land will bear two crops of rice in the year. 
Most soil will bear two crops, the first being millet, 
rape, vegetables, and so on, sown on dry soil and 
ripening at the end of May. Then the ground is at 
once prepared for the wet crop, to be harvested in 
October or thereabouts. Land-tax is payable in 
two instalments. Rice-land pays between the 1st 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 45 

November and the middle of December and the 1st 
January and the last of February. Other land pays 
between July and August and September and 
December. Let us see what the average yield is. 
The gentleman in the sun-hat and the loin-cloth 
would shriek at the figures, but they are ap- 
proximately accurate. Rice naturally fluctuates a 
good deal, but it may be taken in the rough at five 
Japanese dollars (fifteen shillings) per koku of 
330 lbs. Wheat and maize of the first spring crop 
is worth about eleven shillings per koku. The first 
crop gives nearly if koku per tau (the quarter acre 
unit of measurement aforesaid), or eighteen shillings 
per quarter acre, or £3 :12s. per acre. The rice crop 
at two koku or £1 :10s. the quarter acre gives £6 an 
acre. Total £9:125. This is not altogether bad if 
you reflect that the land in question is not the very 
best rice-land, but ordinary No. 1, at £25:165. per 
acre, capital value. 

A son has the right to inherit his father's land 
on the father's assessment, so long as its term 
runs, or, when the term has expired, has a prior 
claim as against any one else. Part of the taxes, it 
is said, lies by in the local prefecture's office as a 
reserve fund against inundations. Yet, and this 
seems a little confusing, there are between five and 
seven other local, provincial, and municipal taxes 
which can reasonably be applied to the same ends. 
No one of these taxes exceeds a half of the land- 



46 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

tax, unless it be the local prefecture tax of 2§ 
per cent. 

In the old days the people were taxed, or perhaps 
squeezed would be the better word, to about one-half 
of the produce of the land. There are those who may 
say that the present system is not so advantageous as 
it looks. Beforetime, the farmers, it is true, paid 
heavily, but only, on their nominal holdings. They 
could, and often did, hold more land than they were 
assessed on. To-day a rigid bureaucracy surveys 
every foot of their farms, and upon every foot they 
have to pay. Somewhat similar complaints are 
made still by the simple peasantry of India, for if 
there is one thing that the Oriental detest more than 
another, it is the damnable Western vice of accuracy. 
That leads to doing things by rule. Still, by the 
look of those terraced fields, where the water is led so 
cunningly from level to level, the Japanese cultivator 
must enjoy at least one excitement. If the villages 
up the valley tamper with the water supply, there 
must surely be excitement down the valley — argu- 
ment, protest, and the breaking of heads. 

The days of romance, therefore, are not all 
dead. 

This that follows happened on the coast twenty 
miles through the fields from Yokohama, at 
Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze 
Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 47 

by. He has been described again and again— his 
majesty, his aloofness, and every one of his dimen- 
sions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the 
plumed hill that makes the background to his 
throne. For that reason he remains, as he remained 
from the beginning, beyond all hope of description— 
as it might be, a visible god sitting in the garden of a 
world made new. They sell photographs of him 
with tourists standing on his thumb nail, and, 
apparently, any brute of any gender can scrawl his or 
her ignoble name over the inside of the massive 
bronze plates that build him up. Think for a 
moment of the indignity and the insult. Imagine 
the ancient, orderly gardens with their clipped trees, 
shorn turf, and silent ponds smoking in the mist 
that the hot sun soaks up after rain, and the green- 
bronze image of the Teacher of the Law wavering 
there as it half seems through incense clouds. The 
earth is all one censer, and myriads of frogs are 
making the haze ring. It is too warm to do more 
than to sit on a stone and watch the eyes that, having 
seen all things, see no more — the down-dropped 
eyes, the forward droop of the head, and the colossal 
simplicity of the folds of the robe over arm and 
knee. Thus, and in no other fashion, did Buddha 
sit in the old days when Ananda asked questions and 
the dreamer began to dream of the lives that lay 
behind him ere the lips moved, and as the Chronicles 
say: "He told a tale." This would be the way he 



48 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

began, for dreamers in the East tell something the 
same sort of tales to-day: "Long ago when 
Devadatta was King of Benares, there lived a 
virtuous elephant, a reprobate ox, and a King 
without understanding." And the tale would end, 
after the moral had been drawn for Ananda's benefit: 
"Now, the reprobate ox was such an one, and the 
King was such another, but the virtuous elephant 
was I, myself, Ananda." Thus, then, he told the 
tales in the bamboo grove, and the bamboo grove is 
there to-day. Little blue and gray and slate-robed 
figures pass under its shadow, buy two or three joss- 
sticks, disappear into the shrine, that is, the body of 
the god, come out smiling, and drift away through 
the shrubberies. A fat carp in a pond sucks at a 
fallen leaf with just the sound of a wicked little 
worldly kiss. Then the earth steams, and steams in 
silence, and a gorgeous butterfly, full six inches from 
wing to wing, cuts through the steam in a zigzag of 
colour and flickers up to the forehead of the god. 
And Buddha said that a man must look on every- 
thing as illusion — even light and colour — the time- 
worn bronze of metal against blue-green of pine and 
pale emerald of bamboo — the lemon sash of the girl 
in the cinnamon dress, with coral pins in her hair, 
leaning against a block of weather-bleached stone — 
and, last, the spray of blood-red azalea that stands 
on the pale gold mats of the tea-house beneath the 
honey-coloured thatch. To overcome desire and 



THE EDGE OF THE EAST 49 

covetousness of mere gold, which is often very vilely 
designed, that is conceivable; but why must a man 
give up the delight of the eye, colour that rejoices, 
light that cheers, and line that satisfies the innermost 
deeps of the heart? Ah, if the Bodhisat had only 
seen his own image! 



Our Overseas Men 

All things considered, there are only two kinds 
of men in the world — those that stay at home and 
those that do not. The second are the most interest- 
ing. Some day a man will bethink himself and 
write a book about the breed in a book called "The 
Book of the Overseas Club," for it is at the club- 
houses all the way from Aden to Yokohama that the 
life of the Outside Men is best seen and their talk is 
best heard. A strong family likeness runs through 
both building and members, and a large and careless 
hospitality is the note. There is always the same 
open-doored, high-ceiled house, with matting on the 
floors; the same come and go of dark-skinned ser- 
vants, and the same assembly of men talking horse 
or business, in raiment that would fatally scan- 
dalise a London committee, among files of news- 
papers from a fortnight to five weeks old. The 
life of the Outside Men includes plenty of sunshine, 
and as much air as may be stirring. At the Cape, 
where the Dutch housewives distil and sell the very 
potent Vanderhun, and the absurd home-made 
hansom cabs waddle up and down the yellow dust of 
Adderley Street are the members of the big import 

50 



OUR OVERSEAS MEN 51 

and export firms, the shipping and insurance offices, 
inventors of mines, and exploiters of new territories 
with now and then an officer strayed from India to 
buy mules for the Government, a Government 
House aide-de-camp, a sprinkling of the officers of 
the garrison, tanned skippers of the Union and 
Castle Lines, and naval men from the squadron at 
Simon's Town. Here they talk of the sins of Cecil 
Rhodes, the insolence of Natal, the beauties or 
otherwise of the solid Boer vote, and the dates of 
the steamers. The argot is Dutch and Kaffir, and 
every one can hum the national anthem that begins 
"Pack your kit and trek, Johnny Bowlegs/' In 
the stately Hongkong Clubhouse, which is to the 
further what the Bengal Club is to the nearer East, 
you meet much the same gathering, minus the 
mining speculators and plus men whose talk is of tea, 
silk, shortings, and Shanghai ponies. The speech of 
the Outside Men at this point becomes fearfully 
mixed with pidgin-English and local Chinese terms, 
rounded with corrupt Portuguese. At Melbourne, 
in a long verandah giving on a grass plot, where 
laughing jackasses laugh very horribly, sit wool 
kings, premiers, and breeders of horses after their 
kind. The older men talk of the days of the Eureka 
Stockade and the younger of "shearing wars" in 
North Queensland, while the traveller moves timidly 
among them wondering what under the world every 
third word means. At Wellington, overlooking the 



5 2 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

harbour (all right-minded clubs should command 
the sea), another and yet a like sort of men speak of 
sheep, the rabbits, the land courts, and the ancient 
heresies of Sir Julius Vogel; and their more expressive 
sentences borrow from the Maori. And elsewhere, 
and elsewhere, and elsewhere among the Outside 
Men it is the same — the same mixture of every 
trade, calling, and profession under the sun; the same 
clash of conflicting interests touching the uttermost 
parts of the earth; the same intimate, and sometimes 
appalling knowledge of your neighbour's business 
and shortcomings; the same large-palmed hospi- 
tality, and the same interest on the part of the 
younger men in the legs of a horse. Decidedly, it is 
at the Overseas Club all the world over that you get 
to know some little of the life of the community. 
London is egoistical, and the world for her ends with 
the four-mile cab radius. There is no provincialism 
like the provincialism of London. That big slack- 
water coated with the drift and rubbish of a thousand 
men's thoughts esteems itself the open sea because 
the waves of all the oceans break on her borders. To 
those in her midst she is terribly imposing, but they 
forget that there is more than one kind of imposition. 
Look back upon her from ten thousand miles, when 
the mail is just in at the Overseas Club, and she is 
wondrous tiny. Nine-tenths of her news — so vital, so 
epoch-making over there — loses its significance, and 
the rest is as the scuffling of ghosts in a back-attic. 



OUR OVERSEAS MEN 53 

Here in Yokohama the Overseas Club has two 
mails and four sets of papers — English, French, 
German, and American, as suits the variety of its 
constitution — and the verandah by the sea, where 
the big telescope stands, is a perpetual feast of the 
Pentecost. The population of the club changes 
with each steamer in harbour, for the sea captains 
swing in, are met with " Hello! where did you come 
from?" and mix at the bar and billiard-tables for 
their appointed time and go to sea again. The 
white-painted warships supply their contingent of 
members also, and there are wonderful men, mines 
of most fascinating adventure, who have an interest 
in sealing-brigs that go to the Kurile Islands, and 
somehow get into trouble with the Russian authori- 
ties. Consuls and judges of the Consular Courts 
meet men over on leave from the China ports, or it 
may be Manila, and they all talk tea, silk, banking, 
and exchange with its fixed residents. Everything 
is always as bad as it can possibly be, and everybody 
is on the verge of ruin. That is why, when they 
have decided that life is no longer worth living, they 
go down to the skittle alley — to commit suicide. 
From the outside, when a cool wind blows among the 
papers and there is a sound of smashing ice in an 
inner apartment, and every third man is talking 
about the approaching races, the life seems to be a 
desirable one. 'What more could a man need to 
make him happy?" says the passer-by. A perfect 



54 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

climate, a lovely country, plenty of pleasant society, 
and the politest people on earth to deal with. The 
resident smiles and invites the passer-by to stay 
through July and August. Further, he presses him 
to do business with the politest people on earth, and 
to continue so doing for a term of years. Thus the 
traveller perceives beyond doubt that the resident is 
prejudiced by the very fact of his residence, and 
gives it as his matured opinion that Japan is a 
faultless land, marred only by the presence of the 
foreign community. And yet, let us consider. It 
is the foreign community that has made it possible 
for the traveller to come and go from hotel to hotel, 
to get his passport for inland travel, to telegraph his 
safe arrival to anxious friends, and generally enjoy 
himself much more than he would have been able 
to do in his own country. Government and gun- 
boats may open a land, but it is the men of the 
Overseas Club that keep it open. Their reward 
(not alone in Japan) is the bland patronage or the 
scarcely-veiled contempt of those who profit by 
their labours. It is hopeless to explain to a traveller 
who has been "shayoed" into half-a-dozen shops 
and "sayonaraed" out of half-a-dozen more and 
politely cheated in each one, that the Japanese is 
an Oriental, and, therefore, embarrassingly eco- 
nomical of the truth. "That's his politeness," says 
the traveller. "He does not wish to hurt your 
feelings. Love him and treat him like a brother, 



OUR OVERSEAS MEN 55 

and he'll change." To treat one of the most secre- 
tive of races on a brotherly basis is not very easy, 
and the natural politeness that enters into a signed 
and sealed contract and undulates out of it so soon 
as it does not sufficiently pay is more than embarrass- 
ing. It is almost annoying. The want of fixity or 
commercial honour may be due to some natural 
infirmity of the artistic temperament, or to the 
manner in which the climate has affected, and his 
ruler has ruled, the man himself for untold centuries. 
Those who know the East know, where the system 
of "squeeze," which is commission, runs through 
every transaction of life, from the sale of a groom's 
place upward, where the woman walks behind the 
man in the streets, and where the peasant gives you 
for the distance to the next town as many or as few 
miles as he thinks you will like, that these things 
must be so. Those who do not know will not be 
persuaded till they have lived there. The Overseas 
Club puts up its collective nose scornfully when it 
hears of the New and Regenerate Japan sprung to 
life since the 'seventies. It grins, with shame be it 
written, at an Imperial Diet modelled on the German 
plan and a Code Napoleon a la Japonaise. It is so 
far behind the New Era as to doubt that an Oriental 
country, ridden by etiquette of the sternest, and 
social distinctions almost as hard as those of caste, 
can be turned out to Western gauge in the compass 
of a very young man's life. And it must be pre- 



56 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

judiced, because it is daily and hourly in contact 
with the Japanese, except when it can do business 
with the Chinaman whom it prefers. Was there ever 
so disgraceful a club ! 

Just at present, a crisis, full blown as a chrysan- 
themum, has developed in the Imperial Diet. 
Both Houses accuse the Government of improper 
interference — this Japanese for "plenty stick and 
some bank-note" — at the recent elections. They 
then did what was equivalent to passing a vote of 
censure on the Ministry and refusing to vote govern- 
ment measures. So far the wildest advocate of 
representative government could have desired noth- 
ing better. Afterwards, things took a distinctly 
Oriental turn. The Ministry refused to resign, and 
the Mikado prorogued the Diet for a week to think 
things over. The Japanese papers are now at issue 
over the event. Some say that representative 
government implies party government, and others 
swear at large. The Overseas Club says for the 
most part — "Skittles!" 

It is a picturesque situation — one that suggests 
romances and extravaganzas. Thus, imagine a 
dreaming Court intrenched behind a triple line 
of moats where the lotus blooms in summer — a 
Court whose outer fringe is aggressively European, 
but whose heart is Japan of long ago, where a dream- 
ing King sits among some wives or other things, 
amused from time to time with magic-lantern shows 



OUR OVERSEAS MEN 57 

and performing fleas — a holy King whose sanctity is 
used to conjure with, and who twice a year gives 
garden-parties where every one must come in top- 
hat and frock coat. Round this Court, wavering 
between the splendours of the sleeping and the 
variety shows of the Crystal Palace, place in furious 
but carefully veiled antagonism the fragments of 
newly shattered castes, their natural Oriental ec- 
centricities overlaid with borrowed Western notions. 
Imagine now, a large and hungry bureaucracy, 
French in its fretful insistence on detail where detail 
is of no earthly moment, Oriental in its stress on 
etiquette and punctilio, recruited from a military 
caste accustomed for ages past to despise alike 
farmer and trader. This caste, we will suppose, is 
more or less imperfectly controlled by a syndicate of 
three clans, which supply their own nominees to the 
Ministry. These are adroit, versatile, and un- 
scrupulous men, hampered by no western prejudice 
in favour of carrying any plan to completion. 
Through and at the bidding of these men, the holy 
Monarch acts; and the acts are wonderful. To 
criticise these acts exists a wild-cat Press, liable to 
suppression at any moment, as morbidly sensitive 
to outside criticism as the American, and almost as 
childishly untruthful, fungoid in the swiftness of its 
growth, and pitiable in its unseasoned rashness. 
Backers of this press in its wilder moments, lawless, 
ignorant, sensitive and vain, are the student class, 



58 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

educated in the main at Government expense, and 
a thorn in the side of the State. Judges without 
training handle laws without precedents, and new 
measures are passed and abandoned with almost 
inconceivable levity. Out of the welter of classes 
and interests that are not those of the common folk 
is evolved the thing called Japanese policy; that has 
the proportion and the perspective of a Japanese 
picture. 

Finality and stability are absent from its councils. 
To-day, for reasons none can explain, it is pro- 
foreign to the verge of servility. To-morrow, for 
reasons equally obscure, the pendulum swings back, 
and — the students are heaving mud at the foreigners 
in the streets. Vexatious, irresponsible, incoherent, 
and, above all, cheaply mysterious, is the rule of the 
land — stultified by intrigue and counter-intrigue, 
chequered with futile reforms begun on European 
lines and light-heartedly thrown aside; studded, 
as a bower-bird's run is studded with shells and 
shining pebbles, with plagiarisms from half the 
world — an operetta of administration, wherein the 
shadow of the King among his wives, Samurai 
policemen, doctors who have studied under Pasteur, 
kid-gloved cavalry officers from St. Cyr, judges with 
University degrees, harlots with fiddles, newspaper 
correspondents, masters of the ancient ceremonies 
of the land, paid members of the Diet, secret societies 
that borrow the knife and the dynamite of the Irish, 



OUR OVERSEAS MEN 59 

sons of dispossessed Daimios returned from Europe 
and waiting for what may turn up, with ministers 
of the syndicate who have wrenched Japan from 
her repose of twenty years ago, circle, flicker, shift, 
and reform, in bewildering rings, round the foreign 
resident. Is the extravaganza complete ? 

Somewhere in the background of the stage are the 
people of the land — of whom a very limited propor- 
tion enjoy the privileges of representative govern- 
ment. Whether in the past few years they have 
learned what the thing means, or, learning, have 
the least intention of making any use of it, is not 
clear. Meantime, the game of government goes 
forward as merrily as a game of puss-in-the-corner, 
with the additional joy that not more than half-a- 
dozen men know who is controlling it or what in the 
wide world it intends to do. In Tokio live the 
steadily-diminishing staff of Europeans employed by 
the Emperor as engineers, railway experts, professors 
in the colleges and so forth. Before many years they 
will all be dispensed with, and the country will set 
forth among the nations alone and on its own 
responsibility. 

In fifty years then, from the time that the in- 
trusive American first broke her peace, Japan will 
experience her new birth and, reorganized from 
sandal to top-knot, play the samisen in the march of 
modern progress. This is the great advantage of 
bting born into the New Era, when individual and 



60 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

community alike can get something for nothing — 
pay without work, education without effort, religion 
without thought, and free government without slow 
and bitter toil. 

The Overseas Club, as has been said, is behind the 
spirit of the age. It has to work for what it gets, 
and it does not always get what it works for. Nor 
can its members take ship and go home when they 
please. Imagine for a little, the contented frame of 
mind that is bred in a man by the perpetual con- 
templation of a harbour full of steamers as a Picca- 
dilly cab-rank of hansoms. The weather is hot, we 
w\ suppose; something has gone wrong with his 
work that day, or his children are not looking so 
well as might be. Pretty tiled bungalows, bowered 
in roses and wistaria, do not console him, and the 
voices of the politest people on earth jar sorely. He 
knows every soul in the club, has thoroughly talked 
out every subject of interest, and would give half a 
year's — oh, five years' pay — for one lung-filling 
breath of air that has life in it, one sniff of the haying 
grass, or half a mile of muddy London street where 
the muffin bell tinkles in the four o'clock fog. Then 
the big liner moves out across the staring blue of the 
bay. So-and-so and such-an-one, both friends, are 
going home in her, and some one else goes next week 
by the French mail. He, and he alone, it seems to 
him, must stay on; and it is so maddeningly easy to 
go — for every one save himself. The boat's smoke 



OUR OVERSEAS MEN 61 

dies out along the horizon, and he is left alone with 
the warm wind and the white dust of the Bund. 
Now Japan is a good place, a place that men swear 
by and live in for thirty years at a stretch. There 
are China ports a week's sail to the westward where 
life is really hard, and where the sight of the restless 
shipping hurts very much indeed. Tourists and 
you who travel the world over, be very gentle to the 
men of the Overseas Clubs. Remember that, un- 
like yourselves, they have not come here for the good 
of their health, and that the return ticket in your 
wallet may possibly colour your views of their land. 
Perhaps it would not be altogether wise on the 
strength of much kindness from Japanese officials 
to recommend that these your countrymen be 
handed over lock, stock, and barrel to a people that 
are beginning to experiment with fresh-drafted, 
half-grafted codes which do not include juries, to a 
system that does not contemplate a free Press, to a 
suspicious absolutism from which there is no appeal. 
Truly, it might be interesting, but as surely it would 
begin in farce and end in tragedy, that would leave 
the politest people on earth in no case to play at 
civilised government for a long time to come. In 
his concession, where he is an apologetic and much 
sat-upon importation, the foreign resident does no 
harm. He does not always sue for money due to 
him on the part of a Japanese. Once outside those 
limits, free to move into the heart of the country 



62 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

it would only be a question of time as to where and 
when the trouble would begin. And in the long run 
it would not be the foreign resident that would 
suffer. The imaginative eye can see the most un- 
pleasant possibilities, from a general overrunning of 
Japan by the Chinaman, who is far the most im- 
portant foreign resident, to the shelling of Tokio by a 
joyous and bounding democracy, anxious to vin- 
dicate her national honour and to learn how her 
newly made navy works. 

But there are scores of arguments that would 
confute and overwhelm this somewhat gloomy 
view. The statistics of Japan, for instance, are as 
beautiful and fit as neatly as the woodwork of her 
houses. By these it would be possible to prove 
anything. 



Some Earthquakes 

A Radical Member of Parliament at Tokio has just 
got into trouble with his constituents, and they have 
sent him a priceless letter of reproof. Among 
other things they point out that a politician should 
not be "a waterweed which wobbles hither and 
thither according to the motion of the stream/' 
Nor should he "like a ghost without legs drift along 
before the wind/' "Your conduct," they say, "has 
been both of a waterweed and a ghost, and we 
purpose in a little time to give you proof of our true 
Japanese spirit/' That member will very likely 
be mobbed in his 'rickshaw and prodded to incon- 
venience with sword-sticks; for the constituencies 
are most enlightened. But how in the world can a 
man under these skies behave except as a waterweed 
and a ghost? It is in the air — the wobble and the 
legless drift. An energetic tourist would have gone 
to Hakodate, seen Ainos at Sapporo, ridden across 
the northern island under the gigantic thistles, 
caught salmon, looked in at Vladivostock, and done 
half a hundred things in the time that one lazy 
loafer has wasted watching the barley turn from 
green to gold, the azaleas blossom and burn out, 

*3 



64 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

and the spring give way to the warm rains of 
summer. Now the iris has taken up the blazonry 
of the year, and the tide of the tourists ebbs west- 
ward. 

The permanent residents are beginning to talk of 
hill places to go to for the hot weather, and all the 
available houses in the resort are let. In a little 
while the men from China will be coming over for 
their holidays, but just at present we are in the 
thick of the tea season, and there is no time to 
waste on frivolities. " Packing " is a valid excuse for 
anything, from forgetting a dinner to declining a 
tennis party, and the tempers of husbands are 
judged leniently. All along the sea face is an in- 
spiring smell of the finest new-mown hay, and canals 
are full of boats loaded up with the boxes jostling 
down to the harbour. At the club men say rude 
things about the arrivals of the mail. There never 
was a post-office yet that did not rejoice in knocking 
a man's Sabbath into flinders. A fair office day's 
work may begin at eight and end at six, or, if the 
mail comes in, at midnight. There is no overtime or 
eight-hours' baby-talk in tea. Yonder are the ships; 
here is the stuff, and behind all is the American 
market. The rest is your own affair. 

The narrow streets are blocked with the wains 
bringing down, in boxes of every shape and size, the 
up-country rough leaf. Some one must take de- 
livery of these things, find room for them in the 



SOME EARTHQUAKES 65 

packed warehouse, and sample them before they are 
blended and go to the firing. 

More than half the elaborate processes are "lost 
work" so far as the quality of the stuff goes; but the 
markets insist on a good-looking leaf, with polish, 
face and curl to it, and in this, as in other businesses, 
the call of the markets is the law. The factory 
floors are made slippery with the tread of bare- 
footed coolies, who shout as the tea whirls through its 
transformations. The over-note to the clamour — an 
uncanny thing too — is the soft rustle-down of the 
tea itself — stacked in heaps, carried in baskets, 
dumped through chutes, rising and falling in the 
long troughs where it is polished, and disappearing 
at last into the heart of the firing-machine — always 
this insistent whisper of moving dead leaves. Steam- 
sieves sift it into grades, with jarrings and thumpings 
that make the floor quiver, and the thunder of 
steam-gear is always at its heels; but it continues to 
mutter unabashed till it is riddled down into the 
big, foil-lined boxes and lies at peace. 

A few days ago the industry suffered a check 
which, lasting not more than two minutes, lost 
several hundred pounds of hand-fired tea. It was 
something after this way. Into the stillness of a 
hot, stuffy morning came an unpleasant noise as of 
batteries of artillery charging up all the roads to- 
gether, and at least one bewildered sleeper waking 
saw his empty boots where they "sat and played 



66 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

toccatas stately at the clavicord." It was the 
washstand really but the effect was awful. Then a 
clock fell and a wall cracked, and heavy hands 
caught the house by the roof-pole and shook it 
furiously. To preserve an equal mind when things 
are hard is good, but he who has not fumbled des- 
perately at bolted jalousies that will not open while 
a whole room is being tossed in a blanket does not 
know how hard it is to find any sort of mind at all. 
The end of the terror was inadequate — a rush into 
the still, heavy outside air, only to find the servants 
in the garden giggling (the Japanese would giggle 
through the Day of Judgment) and to learn that the 
earthquake was over. Then came the news, swift 
borne from the business quarters below the hill, that 
the coolies of certain factories had fled shrieking at 
the first shock, and that all the tea in the pans was 
burned to a crisp. That, certainly, was some con- 
solation for undignified panic; and there remained 
the hope that a few tall chimneys up the line at 
Tokio would have collapsed. They stood firm, 
however, and the local papers, used to this kind of 
thing, merely spoke of the shock as " severe.' ' 
Earthquakes are demoralising; but they bring out 
all the weaknesses of human nature. First is down- 
right dread; the stage of — "only let me get into the 
open and HI reform," then the impulse to send 
news of the most terrible shock of modern times 
flying east and west among the cables. (Did not 



SOME EARTHQUAKES 67 

your own hair stand straight on end, and, therefore, 
must not everybody else's have done likewise?) 
Last, as fallen humanity picks itself together, comes 
the cry of the mean little soul: "What! Was that 
all? I wasn't frightened from the beginning." 

It is wholesome and tonic to realise the power- 
lessness of man in the face of these little accidents. 
The heir of all the ages, the annihilator of time and 
space, who politely doubts the existence of his Maker, 
hears the roof-beams crack and strain above him, 
and scuttles about like a rabbit in a stoppered war- 
ren. If the shock endure for twenty minutes, the 
annihilator of time and space must camp out under 
the blue and hunt for his dead among the rubbish. 
Given a violent convulsion (only just such a slipping 
of strata as carelessly piled volumes will accomplish 
in a book-case) and behold, the heir of all the ages is 
stark, raving mad — a brute among the dishevelled 
hills. Set a hundred of the world's greatest spirits, 
men of fixed principles, high aims, resolute endeavour, 
enormous experience, and the modesty that these 
attributes bring — set them to live through such a 
catastrophe as that which wiped out Nagoya last 
October, and at the end of three days there would 
remain few whose souls might be called their own. 

So much for yesterday's shock. To-day there 
has come another; and a most comprehensive affair 
it is. It has broken nothing, unless maybe an old 
heart or two cracks later on; and the wise people in 



68 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

the settlement are saying that they predicted it from 
the first. None the less as an earthquake it deserves 
recording. 

It was a very rainy afternoon; all the streets were 
full of gruelly mud, and all the business men were at 
work in their offices when it began. A knot of 
Chinamen were studying a closed door from 
whose further side came a most unpleasant sound of 
bolting and locking up. The notice on the door was 
interesting. With deep regret did the manager of 
the New Oriental Banking Corporation, Limited 
(most decidedly limited) announce that by tele- 
graphic orders from home he had suspended pay- 
ment. Said one Chinaman to another in pidgin- 
Japanese: "It is shut," and went away. The 
noise of barring up continued, the rain fell, and the 
notice stared down the wet street. That was all. 
There must have been two or three men passing 
by to whom the announcement meant the loss of 
every penny of their savings — comforting knowledge 
to digest after tiffin. In London, of course, the 
failure would not mean so much; there are many 
banks in the City, and people would have had 
warning. Here banks are few, people are dependent 
on them, and this news came out of the sea un- 
heralded, an evilborn with all its teeth. 

After the crash of a bursting shell every one who 
can picks himself up, brushes the dirt off his uniform, 
and tries to make a joke of it. Then some one 



SOME EARTHQUAKES 69 

whips a handkerchief round his hand — a splinter has 
torn it — and another finds warm streaks running 
down his forehead. Then a man, overlooked till 
now and past help, groans to the death. Everybody 
perceives with a start that this is no time for laughter, 
and the dead and wounded are attended to. 

Even so at the Overseas Club when the men got 
out of office. The brokers had told them the news. 
In filed the English, and Americans, and Germans, 
and French, and "Here's a pretty mess!" they said 
one and all. Many of them were hit, but, like good 
men, they did not say how severely. 

"Ah!" said a little P. and O. official, wagging his 
head sagaciously (he had lost a thousand dollars 
since noon), "It's all right now. They're trying to 
make the best of it. In three or four days we shall 
hear more about it. I meant to draw my money 

just before I went down coast, but " Curiously 

enough, it was the same story throughout the Club. 
Everybody had intended to withdraw, and nearly 
everybody had — not done so. The manager of a 
bank which had not failed was explaining how, in his 
opinion, the crash had come about. This was also 
very human. It helped none. Entered a lean 
American, throwing back his waterproof all dripping 
with the rain ; his face was calm and peaceful. " Boy, 
whisky and soda," he said. 

"How much haf you losd?" said a Teuton bluntly. 
"Eight-fifty," replied the son of George Washington 



70 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

sweetly. "Don't sec how that prevents me having 
a drink. My glass, sirr." He continued an in- 
terrupted whistling of "I owe ten dollars to O'Grady" 
(which he very probably did), and his countenance 
departed not from its serenity. If there is anything 
that one loves an American for it is the way he 
stands certain kinds of punishment. An English- 
man and a heavy loser was being chaffed by a 
Scotchman whose account at the Japan end of the 
line had been a trifle overdrawn. True, he would 
lose in England, but the thought of the few dollars 
saved here cheered him. 

More men entered, sat down by tables, stood 
in groups, or remained apart by themselves, thinking 
with knit brows. One must think quickly when 
one's bills are falling due. The murmur of voices 
thickened, and there was no rumbling in the skittle- 
alley to interrupt it. Everybody knows everybody 
else at the Overseas Club, and everybody sym- 
pathises. A man passed stiffly and some one of a 
group turned to ask lightly, "Hit, old man?" 
"Like hell," he said, and went on biting his unlit 
cigar. Another man was telling, slowly and some- 
what bitterly, how he had expected one of his chil- 
dren to join him out here, and how the passage had 
been paid with a draft on the O. B. C. But 
now . . . There, ladies and gentlemen, is where 
it hurts, this little suspension out here. It destroys 
plans, pretty ones hoped for and prayed over, maybe 



SOME EARTHQUAKES 71 

for years; it knocks pleasant domestic arrange- 
ments galleywest over and above all the mere ruin 
that it causes. The curious thing in the talk was 
that there was no abuse of the bank. The men were 
in the Eastern trade themselves and they knew. It 
was the Yokohama manager and the clerks thrown 
out of employment (connection with a broken 
bank, by the way, goes far to ruin a young man's 
prospects) for whom they were sorry. " We're 
doing ourselves well this year," said a wit grimly. 
"One free-shooting case, one thundering libel case, 
and a bank smash. Showing off pretty before the 
globe-trotters, aren't we?" 

"Gad, think of the chaps at sea with letters of 
credit. Eh ? They'll land and get the best rooms at 
the hotels and find they're penniless," said another. 

"Never mind the globe-trotters," said a third. 
"Look nearer home. This does for so-and-so, and 
so-and-so, and so-and-so, all old men; and every 
penny of theirs goes. Poor devils!" 

"That reminds me of some one else," said yet 
another voice. "His wife's at home, too. Whew!" 
and he whistled drearily. So did the tide of voices 
run on till men got to talking over the chances of a 
dividend. "They went to the Bank of England," 
drawled an American, "and the Bank of England 
let them down. 'Said their securities weren't good 
enough." 

"Great Scott!" — a hand came down on a table to 



72 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

emphasise the remark — "I sailed half way up the 
Mediterranean once with a Bank of England director; 
wish I'd tipped him over the rail and lowered him a 
boat on his own security — if it was good enough/' 

"Baring's goes. The O. B. C. don't/' replied the 
American, blowing smoke through his nose. "This 
business looks de-ci-ded-ly prob-le-mat-i-cal. What- 
at?" 

"Oh, they'll pay the depositors in full. Don't 
you fret," said a man who had lost nothing and was 
anxious to console. 

"I'm a shareholder," said the American, and 
smoked on. 

The rain continued to fall, and the umbrellas 
dripped in the racks, and the wet men came and 
went, circling round the central fact that it was a 
bad business, till the day, as was most fit, shut down 
in drizzling darkness. There was a refreshing sense 
of brotherhood in misfortunes in the little community 
that had just been electrocuted and did not want any 
more shocks. All the pain that in England would be 
taken home to be borne in silence and alone was here 
bulked, as it were, and faced in line of companies. 
Surely the Christians of old must have fought much 
better when they met the lions by fifties at a time. 

At last the men departed; the bachelors to cast 
up accounts by themselves (there should be some 
good ponies for sale shortly) and the married men to 
take counsel. May heaven help him whose wife 



SOME EARTHQUAKES 73 

does not stand by him now! But the women of the 
Overseas settlements are as thorough as the men. 
There will be tears for plans forgone, the changing of 
the little ones' schools and elder children's careers, 
unpleasant letters to be written home, and more 
unpleasant ones to be received from relatives who 
"told you so from the first." There will be pinchings 
too, and straits of which the outside world will know 
nothing, but the women will pull it through smiling. 
Beautiful indeed are the operations of modern 
finance — especially when anything goes wrong with 
the machine. To-night there will be trouble in 
India among the Ceylon planters, the Calcutta jute 
and the Bombay cotton-brokers, besides the little 
households of small banked savings. In Hongkong, 
Singapore, and Shanghai there will be trouble too, 
and goodness only knows what wreck at Chelten- 
ham, Bath, St. Leonard's, Torquay, and the other 
camps of the retired Army officers. They are 
lucky in England who know what happens when it 
happens, but here the people are at the wrong end 
of the cables, and the situation is not good. Only 
one thing seems certain. There is a notice on a 
shut door, in the wet, and by virtue of that notice all 
the money that was theirs yesterday is gone away, 
and it may never come back again. So all the work 
that won the money must be done over again; but 
some of the people are old, and more are tired, and 
all are disheartened. It is a very sorrowful little 



74 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

community that goes to bed to-night, and there 
must be as sad ones the world over. Let it be 
written, however, that of the sections under fire here 
(and some are cruelly hit) no man whined, or whimp- 
ered, or broke down. There was no chance of 
fighting. It was bitter defeat, but they took it 
standing. 



Half-a-Dozen Pictures 

"Some men when they grow rich, store pictures in a 
gallery." Living their friends envy them, and after 
death the genuineness of the collection is disputed 
under a dispersing hammer. 

A better way is to spread your pictures over all 
earth; visiting them as Fate allows. Then none can 
steal or deface, nor any reverse of fortune force a 
sale; sunshine and tempest warm and ventilate the 
gallery for nothing, and — in spite of all that has 
been said of her crudeness — Nature is not altogether 
a bad frame-maker. The knowledge that you may 
never live to see an especial treasure twice teaches the 
eyes to see quickly while the light lasts; and the 
possession of such a gallery breeds a very fine con- 
tempt for painted shows and the smeared things that 
are called pictures. 

In the North Pacific, to the right hand as you go 
westward, hangs a small study of no particular 
value as compared with some others. The mist is 
down on an oily stretch of washed-out sea; through 
the mist the bats-wings of a sealing schooner are just 
indicated. In the foreground, all but leaping out 
of the frame, an open row-boat, painted the crudest 

75 



76 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

blue and white, rides up over the shoulder of a 
swell. A man in blood-red jersey and long boots, all 
shining with moisture, stands at the bows holding 
up the carcase of a silver-bellied sea-otter from whose 
pelt the wet drips in moonstones. Now the artist 
who could paint the silver wash of the mist, the 
wriggling treacly reflection of the boat, and the raw 
red wrists of the man would be something of a work- 
man. 

But my gallery is in no danger of being copied at 
present. Three years since, I met an artist in the 
stony bed of a brook, between a line of 300 graven, 
lichened godlings and a flaming bank of azaleas, 
swearing horribly. He had been trying to paint one 
of my pictures — nothing more than a big water-worn 
rock tufted with flowers and a snow-capped hill for 
background. Most naturally he failed, because 
there happened to be absolutely no perspective in 
the thing, and he was pulling the lines about to 
make some for home consumption. No man can 
put the contents of a gallon jar into a pint mug. 
The protests of all uncomfortably-crowded mugs 
since the world began have settled that long ago, and 
have given us the working theories, devised by im- 
perfect instruments for imperfect instrument, which 
are called Rules of Art. 

Luckily, those who painted my gallery were born 
before man. Therefore, my pictures, instead of 
being boxed up by lumbering bars of gold, are 



HALF-A-DOZEN PICTURES 77 

disposed generously between latitudes, equinoxes, 
monsoons, and the like, and, making all allowance for 
an owner's partiality, they are really not so bad. 

"Down in the South where the ships never go" — 
between the heel of New Zealand and the South 
Pole, there is a sea-piece showing a steamer trying to 
come round in the trough of a big beam sea. The 
wet light of the day's end comes more from the 
water than the sky, and the waves are colourless 
through the haze of the rain, all but two or three 
blind sea-horses swinging out of the mist on the 
ship's dripping weather sides. A lamp is lighted in 
the wheel-house; so one patch of yellow light falls 
on the green-painted pistons of the steering gear as 
they snatch up the rudder chains. A big sea has 
got home. Her stern flies up in the lather of a 
freed screw, and her deck from poop to the break of 
the foc's'le goes under in gray-green water level as a 
mill-race, except where it spouts up above the 
donkey-engine and the stored derrick-booms. For- 
ward there is nothing but this glare; aft, the inter- 
rupted wake drives far to leeward a cut kite string 
dropped across the seas. The sole thing that has 
any rest in the turmoil is the jewelled, unwinking 
eye of an albatross, who is beating across wind 
leisurely and unconcerned, almost within hand's 
touch. It is the monstrous egotism of that eye that 
makes the picture. By all the rules of art there 
should be a lighthouse or a harbour pier in the back- 



78 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

ground to show that everything will end happily. 
But there is not, and the red eye does not eare 
whether the thing beneath the still wings stays or 
staves. 

The sister-panel hangs in the Indian Ocean and 
tells a story, but is none the worse for that. Here 
you have hot tropical sunlight and a foreshore 
clothed in stately palms running out into a still and 
steamy sea burnished steel blue. Along the fore- 
shore, questing as a wounded beast quests for lair, 
hurries a loaded steamer never built for speed. 
Consequently, she tears and threshes the water to 
pieces, and piles it under her nose and cannot put it 
under her cleanly. Coir-coloured cargo bales are 
stacked round both masts, and her decks are 
crammed and double-crammed with dark-skinned pas- 
sengers — from the focYle where they interfere with 
the crew to the stern where they hamper the wheel. 

The funnel is painted blue on yellow, giving her a 
holiday air, a little out of keeping with the yellow 
and black cholera flag at her main. She dare not 
stop; she must not communicate with any one. 
There are leprous streaks of lime-wash trickling down 
her plates for a sign of this. So she threshes on 
down the glorious coast, she and her swarming 
passengers, with the sickness that destroyeth in the 
noonday eating out her heart. 

Yet another, the pick of all the East rooms, before 
we have done with blue water. Most of the nations 



HALF-A-DOZEN PICTURES 79 

of the earth are at issue under a stretch of white 
awning above a crowded deck. The cause of the 
dispute, a deep copper bowl full of rice and fried 
onions, is upset in the foreground. Malays, 
Lascars, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Burmans — 
the whole gamut of race-tints, from saffron to tar- 
black — are twisting and writhing round it, while 
their vermilion, cobalt, amber, and emerald turbans 
and head-cloths are lying under foot. Pressed 
against the yellow ochre of the iron bulwarks to left 
and right are frightened women and children in 
turquoise and isabella-coloured clothes. They are 
half protected by mounds of upset bedding, straw 
mats, red lacquer boxes, and plaited bamboo 
trunks, mixed up with tin plates, brass and copper 
hukas> silver opium pipes, Chinese playing cards, and 
properties enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild. 
In the centre of the crowd of furious half-naked men, 
the fat bare back of a Burman, tattooed from 
collar-bone to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of 
red and blue devils, holds the eye first. It is a 
wicked back. Beyond it is the flicker of a Malay 
kris. A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a 
stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an 
ecstasy of terror. Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and 
bananas have been knocked down from their ripening- 
places, and are lying between the feet of the fighters. 
One pine has rolled against the long brown fur of a 
muzzled bear. His owner, a bushy-bearded Hindu, 



8o FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

kneels over the animal, his body-cloth thrown 
clear of a hard brown arm, his fingers ready to loose 
the muzzle-strap. The ship's cook, in blood-stained 
white, watches from the butcher's shop, and a 
black Zanzibar stoker grins through the bars of the 
engine-room hatch, one ray of sun shining straight 
into his pink mouth. The officer of the watch, a 
red-whiskered man, is kneeling down on the bridge to 
peer through the railings, and is shifting a long, lean 
black revolver from his left hand to his right. The 
faithful sunlight that puts everything into place, 
gives his whiskers and the hair on the back of his 
tanned wrist just the colour of the copper pot, the 
bear's fur and the trampled pines. For the rest, 
there is the blue sea beyond the awnings. 

Three years' hard work, besides the special knowl- 
edge of a lifetime, would be needed to copy — even 
to copy — this picture. Mr. So-and-so, R. A., could 
undoubtedly draw the bird; Mr. Such-another 
(equally R. A.) the bear; and scores of gentlemen the 
still life; but who would be the man to pull the 
whole thing together and make it the riotous, tossing 
cataract of colour and life that it is? And when it 
was done, some middle-aged person from the prov- 
inces, who had never seen a pineapple out of a plate, 
or a kris out of the South Kensington, would say 
that it did not remind him of something that it 
ought to remind him of, and therefore that it was 
bad. If the gallery could be bequeathed to the 



HALF-A-DOZEN PICTURES 81 

nation, something might, perhaps, be gained, but the 
nation would complain of the draughts and the 
absence of chairs. But no matter. In another 
world we shall see certain gentlemen set to tickle 
the backs of Circe's swine through all eternity. 
Also, they will have to tickle with their bare hands! 

The Japanese rooms, visited and set in order for 
the second time, hold more pictures than could be 
described in a month; but most of them are small 
and, excepting always the light, within human 
compass. One, however, might be difficult. It was 
an unexpected gift, picked up in a Tokio bye street 
after dark. Half the town was out for a walk, 
and all the people's clothes were indigo, and so were 
the shadows, and most of the paper-lanterns were 
drops of blood red. By the light of smoking oil- 
lamps people were selling flowers and shrubs — 
wicked little dwarf pines, stunted peach and plum 
trees, wistaria bushes clipped and twisted out of all 
likeness to wholesome plants, leaning and leering 
out of green-glaze pots. In the flickering of the 
yellow flames, these forced cripples and the yellow 
faces above them reeled to and fro fantastically all 
together. As the light steadied they would return 
to the pretence of being green things till a puff of the 
warm night wind among the flares set the whole 
line off again in a crazy dance of dwergs, their 
shadows capering on the house fronts behind them. 

At a corner of a street, some rich men had got 



82 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

together and left unguarded all the gold, diamonds, 
and rubies of the East; but when you came near you 
saw that this treasure was only a gathering of gold- 
fish in glass globes — yellow, white, and red fish, with 
from three to five forked tails apiece and eyes that 
bulged far beyond their heads. There were wooden 
pans full of tiny ruby fish, and little children with nets 
dabbled and shrieked in chase of some special beauty, 
and the frightened fish kicked up showers of little 
pearls with their tails. The children carried lanterns 
in the shape of small red paper fish bobbing at the 
end of slivers of bamboo, and these drifted through 
the crowd like a strayed constellation of baby stars. 
When the children stood at the edge of a canal and 
called down to unseen friends in boats the pink 
lights were all reflected orderly below. The light of 
the thousand small lights in the street went straight 
up into the darkness among the interlacing telegraph 
wires, and just at the edge of the shining haze, on a 
sort of pigeon-trap, forty feet above ground, sat a 
Japanese fireman, wrapped up in his cloak, keeping 
watch against fires. He looked unpleasantly like a 
Bulgarian atrocity or a Burmese "deviation from 
the laws of humanity/' being very still and all 
huddled up in his roost. That was a superb picture 
and it arranged itself to admiration. Now, disre- 
garding these things and others — wonders and 
miracles all — men are content to sit in studios and, 
by light that is not light, to fake subjects from pots 



HALF-A-DOZEN PICTURES 83 

and pans and rags and bricks that are called pieces 
of colour. Their collection of rubbish costs in the 
end quite as much as a ticket, a first-class one, to new 
worlds where the "props" are given away with the 
sunshine. To do anything because it is or may not 
be new on the market is wickedness that carries its 
own punishment; but surely there must be things in 
this world paintable other and beyond those that lie 
between the North Cape, say, and Algiers. For the 
sake of the pictures, putting aside the dear delight of 
the gamble, it might be worth while to venture out a 
little beyond the regular circle of subjects and — see 
what happens. If a man can draw one thing, it has 
been said, he can draw anything. At the most he 
can but fail, and there are several matters in the 
world worse than failure. Betting on a certainty, 
for instance, or playing with nicked cards is im- 
moral, and secures expulsion from clubs. Keeping 
deliberately to one set line of work because you 
know you can do it and are certain to get money by 
so doing is, on the other hand, counted a virtue, and 
secures admission to clubs. There must be a middle 
way somewhere, as there must be somewhere an 
unmarried man with no position, reputation, or 
other vanity to lose, who most keenly wants to find 
out what his palette is set for in this life. He will 
pack his steamer-trunk and get into the open to 
wrestle with effects that he can never reproduce. 
All the same his will be a superb failure. 



"Captains Courageous" 

From Yokohama to Montreal is a long day's journey, 
and the forepart is uninviting. In three voyages 
out of five, the North Pacific, too big to lie altogether 
idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a 
storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the pas- 
sengers fresh from Japan heat wither in the chill, and 
a clammy dew distils from the rigging. That gray 
monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet 
new and not used to the procession of keels. It 
holds a very few pictures and the best of its stories— 
those relating to seal-poaching among the Kuriles 
and the Russian rookeries — are not exactly fit for 
publication. There is a man in Yokohama who in 
a previous life burned galleons with Drake. He is a 
gentleman adventurer of the largest and most 
resourceful — by instinct a carver of kingdoms, a 
ruler of men on the high seas, and an inveterate 
gambler against Death. Because he supplies noth- 
ing more than sealskins to the wholesale dealers at 
home, the fame of his deeds, his brilliant fights, his 
more brilliant escapes, and his most brilliant strategy 
will be lost among sixty-ton schooners, or told only in 
the mouths of drunken seamen whom none believe. 

84 



"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" 85 

Now there sits a great spirit under the palm trees 
of the Navigator Group, a thousand leagues to the 
south, and he, crowned with roses and laurels, 
strings together the pearls of those parts. When he 
has done with this down there perhaps he will turn 
to the Smoky Seas and the Wonderful Adventures of 

Captain Then there will be a tale to listen to. 

But the first touch of dry land makes the sea and 
all upon it unreal. Five minutes after the traveller 
is on the C. P. R. train at Vancouver there is no 
romance of blue water, but another kind — the life 
of the train into which he comes to grow as into life 
aboard ship. A week on wheels turns a man into a 
part of the machine. He knows when the train will 
stop to water, wait for news of the trestle ahead, 
drop the dining-car, slip into a sliding to let the 
West-bound mail go by, or yell through the thick 
night for an engine to help push up the bank. The 
snort, the snap and whine of the air-brakes have a 
meaning for him, and he learns to distinguish between 
noises — between the rattle of a loose lamp and the 
ugly rattle of small stones on a scarped embankment 
— between the "Hoot! toot!" that scares wandering 
cows from the line, and the dry roar of the engine at 
the distance-signal. In England the railway came 
late into a settled country fenced round with the 
terrors of the law, and it has remained ever since 
just a little outside daily life — a thing to be re- 
spected. 



86 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

Here it strolls along, with its hands in its pockets 
and a straw in its mouth, on the heels of the rough- 
hewn trail or log road — a platformless, regulationless 
necessity; and it is treated even by sick persons and 
young children with a familiarity that sometimes 
affects the death-rate. There was a small maiden 
aged seven, who honoured our smoking compart- 
ment with her presence when other excitements failed, 
and it was she that said to the conductor, "When 
do we change crews? I want to pick water-lilies — 
yellow ones." A mere halt she knew would not suffice 
for her needs; but the regular fifteen-minute stop, 
when the red-painted tool chest was taken off the 
rear car and a new gang came aboard. The big man 
bent down to little Impudence — "Want to pick lilies, 
eh ? What would you do if the cars went on and took 
mamma away, Sis?" "Take the next train," she re- 
plied," and tell the conductor to send me to Brooklyn. 
I live there." "But s'pose he wouldn't?" "He'd 
have to," said Young America. "I'd be a lost child." 
Now, from the province of Alberta to Brooklyn, 
U. S. A., may be three thousand miles. A great 
stretch of that distance is as new as the day before 
yesterday, and strewn with townships in every stage 
of growth from the city of one round house, two log 
huts, and a Chinese camp somewhere in the foot hills 
of the Selkirks, to Winnipeg with her league-long 
main street and her warring newspapers. Just at 
present there is an epidemic of politics in Manitoba, 



"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" 87 

and brass bands and notices of committee meetings 
are splashed about the towns. By reason of their 
closeness to the States they have caught the con- 
tagion of foul-mouthedness, and accusations of 
bribery, corruption, and evil-living are many. It 
is sweet to find a little baby-city, with only three men 
in it who can handle type, cursing and swearing 
across the illimitable levels for all the world as 
though it were a grown-up Christian centre. 

All the new towns have their own wants to con- 
sider, and the first of these is a railway. If the 
town is on a line already, then a new line to tap the 
back country; but at all costs a line. For this it 
will sell its corrupted soul, and then be very indig- 
nant because the railway before which it has 
grovelled rides rough-shod over the place. 

Each new town believes itself to be a possible 
Winnipeg until the glamour of the thing is a little 
worn off, and the local paper, sliding down the pole 
of Pride with the hind legs of despair, says defiantly: 
"At least, a veterinary surgeon and a drug-store 
would meet with encouragement in our midst, and it 
is a fact that five new buildings have been erected in 
our midst since the spring/'' From a distance noth- 
ing is easier than to smile at this sort of thing, but he 
must have a cool head who can keep his pulse level 
when just such a wildcat town—ten houses, two 
churches, and a line of rails — gets "on the boom/' 
The reader at home says, "Yes, but it's all a lie." 



88 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

It may be, but — did men lie about Denver, Leadville, 
Ballarat, Broken Hill, Portland, or Winnipeg twenty 
years ago — or Adelaide when town lots went begging 
within the memory of middle-aged men ? Did they 
lie about Vancouver six years since, or Creede not 
twenty months gone? Hardly; and it is just this 
knowledge that leads the passer-by to give ear to the 
wildest statements of the wildest towns. Anything 
is possible, especially among the Rockies where the 
minerals lie, over and above the mining towns, the 
centres of ranching country, and the supply towns to 
the farming districts. There are literally scores 
upon scores of lakelets in the hills, buried in woods 
now, that before twenty years are run will be crowded 
summer resorts. You in England have no idea of 
what summering means in the States, and less of the 
amount of money that is spent on the yearly holiday. 
People have no more than just begun to discover the 
place called the Banff Hot Springs, two days west of 
Winnipeg. 1 In a little time they will know half-a- 
dozen spots not a day's ride from Montreal, and it is 
along that line that money will be made. In those 
days, too, wheat will be grown for the English 
market four hundred miles north of the present 
fields on the west side; and British Columbia, 
perhaps the loveliest land in the world next to New 
Zealand, will have her own line of six thousand ton 
steamers to Australia, and the British investor will 

*See p. 201. 



"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" 89 

no longer throw away his money on hellicat South 
American republics, or give it as a hostage to the 
States. He will keep it in the family as a wise man 
should. Then the towns that are to-day the only 
names in the wilderness, yes, and some of those 
places marked on the map as Hudson Bay Ports will 
be cities, because — but it is hopeless to make peo- 
ple understand that actually and indeed. We do 
possess an Empire of which Canada is only one 
portion — an Empire which is not bounded by election- 
returns on the North and Eastbourne riots on the 
South — an Empire that has not yet been scratched. 
Let us return to the new towns. Three times 
within one year did fortune come knocking to the 
door of a man I know. Once at Seattle, when that 
town was a gray blur after a fire; once at Tacoma, in 
the days when the steam-tram ran off the rails 
twice a week; and once at Spokane Falls. But in 
the roar of the land-boom he did not hear her, and 
she went away leaving him only a tenderness akin to 
weakness for all new towns, and a desire, mercifully 
limited by lack of money, to gamble in every one of 
them. Of all the excitements that life offers there 
are few to be compared with the whirl of a red-hot 
boom; also it is strictly moral, because you do fairly 
earn your unearned increment by labour and 
perspiration and sitting up far into the night — by 
working like a fiend, as all pioneers must do. And 
consider all that is in it. The headlong stampede 



9 o FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

to the new place; the money dashed down like 
counters for merest daily bread; the arrival of the 
piled cars whence the raw material of a city — men, 
lumber, and shingle — are shot on to the not yet 
nailed platform; the slashing out and pegging down 
of roads across the blank face of the wilderness; the 
heaving up amid shouts and yells of the city's one 
electric light — a raw sizzling arc atop of an unbarked 
pine pole; the sweating, jostling mob at the sale of 
town-lots; the roar of "Let the woman have it!" 
that stops all bidding when the one other woman in 
the place puts her price on a plot; the packed real 
estate offices; the real estate agents themselves, lost 
novelists of prodigious imagination; the gorgeous 
pink and blue map of the town, hung up in the bar- 
room, with every railroad from Portland to Portland 
meeting in its heart; the misspelled curse against 
"this dam hole in the ground" scrawled on the 
flank of a strayed freight-car by some man who had 
lost his money and gone away; the conferences at 
street corners of syndicates six hours established by 
men not twenty-five years old; the out-spoken 
contempt for the next town, also "on the boom," 
and, therefore, utterly vile; the unceasing tramp of 
heavy feet on the board pavement, where stranger 
sometimes turns on stranger in an agony of convic- 
tion, and, shaking him by the shoulder, shouts in 
his ear, "By G — d! Isn't it grand? Isn't it 
glorious?" and last, the sleep of utterly worn-out 



"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" 91 

men, three in each room of the shanty hotel: "All 
meals two dollars. All drinks thirty-five cents. 
No washing done here. The manager not responsible 
for anything. 5 ' Does the bald catalogue of these 
recitals leave you cold? It is possible; but it is also 
possible after three days in a new town to set the full 
half of a truck load of archbishops fighting for 
corner lots as they never fought for mitre or crozier. 
There is a contagion in a boom as irresistible as that 
of a panic in a theatre. 

After a while things settle down, and then the 
carpenter, who is also an architect, can lay his bare 
arms across the bar and sell them to the highest 
bidder, for the houses are coming up like toadstools 
after rain. The men who do not build cheer those 
who do, in that building means backing your belief 
in your town — -yours to you and peculiarly con- 
found all other towns whatsoever! Behind the 
crowd of business men the weekly town paper plays 
as a stockwhip plays on a mob of cattle! There is 
honour, heaped, extravagant, imperial for the good — 
the employer of labour, the builder of stores, the 
spender of money; there is abuse, savage and out- 
rageous, for the bad, the man who "buys out of the 
town," the man who intends to go, the sitter on the 
fence; with persuasion and invitation in prose, 
verse, and zincograph for all that outside world 
which prefers to live in cities other than Ours. 

Now the editor, as often as not, begins as a 



92 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

mercenary and ends as a patriot. This, too, is all of 
a piece with human nature. A few years later, if 
Providence is good, comes the return for judicious 
investment. Perhaps the town has stood the test 
of boom, and that which was clapboard is now 
Milwaukee brick or dressed stone, vile in design but 
permanent. The shanty hotel is the Something 
House, with accommodation for two hundred guests. 
The manager who served you in his shirt-sleeves as 
his own hotel clerk, is gorgeous in broadcloth, and 
needs to be reminded of the first meeting. Suburban 
villas more or less adorn the flats, from which the 
liveliest fancy (and fancy was free in the early days) 
hung back. Horse-cars jingle where the prairie 
schooner used to stick fast in the mud-hole, scooped 
to that end opposite the saloon; and there is a Belt 
Electric Service paying fabulous dividends. Then, 
do you, feeling older than Methuselah and twice as 
important, go forth and patronize things in general, 
while the manager tells you exactly what sort of 
millionaire you would have been if you had " stayed 
by the town." 

Or else — the bottom has tumbled out of the 
boom, and the town new made is dead — dead as a 
young man's corpse laid out in the morning. Success 
was not justified by success. Of ten thousand not 
three hundred remain, and these live in huts on the 
outskirts of the brick streets. The hotel, with its 
suites of musty rooms, is a big tomb; the factory 



"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS" 93 

chimneys are cold; the villas have no glass in them, 
and the fire-weed glows in the centre of the drive- 
ways, mocking the arrogant advertisements in the 
empty shops. There is nothing to do except to catch 
trout in the stream that was to have been defiled 
by the city sewage. A two-pounder lies fanning 
himself just in the cool of the main culvert, where 
the alders have crept up to the city wall. You 
pay your money and, more or less, you take your 
choice. 

By the time that man has seen these things and a 
few others that go with a boom he may say that he 
has lived, and talk with his enemies in the gate. He 
has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the 
inward kernel of that romance, which some little 
folk say is vanished. Here they lie in their false 
teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and Sir 
Philip Sydney dies every few months if you know 
where to look. The adventurers and captains 
courageous of old have only changed their dress a 
little and altered their employment to suit the 
world in which they move. Clive came down from 
Lobengula's country a few months ago protesting 
that there was an empire there, and finding very few 
that believed. Hastings studied a map of South 
Africa in a corrugated iron hut at Johannesburg 
ten years ago. Since then he has altered the map 
considerably to the advantage of the Empire, but 
the heart of the Empire is set on ballot-boxes and 



94 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

small lies. The illustrious Don Quixote to-day 
lives on the north, coast of Australia where he has 
found the treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon. 
Now and again he destroys black fellows who hide 
under his bed to spear him. Young Hawkins, with 
a still younger Boscawen for his second, was till last 
year chasing slave-dhows round Tajurrah; they have 
sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to be grilled into 
an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval has been 
holding the " Republic " of Mexico by the throat 
any time these fourteen years gone. The others, 
big men all and not very much afraid of responsi- 
bility, are selling horses, breaking trails, drinking 
sangaree, running railways beyond the timberline, 
swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, and 
making cities where no cities were, in all the five 
quarters of the world. Only people will not believe 
this when you tell them. They are too near things 
and a great deal too well fed. So they say of the 
most cold-blooded realism: "This is romance. 
How interesting!" And of over-handled, thumb- 
marked realism: "This is indeed romance!" It is 
the next century that, looking over its own, will see 
the heroes of our time clearly. 

Meantime this earth of ours — we hold a fair slice 
of it so far — is full of wonders and miracles and 
mysteries and marvels, and, in default, it is good to 
go up and down seeing and hearing tell of them all. 



On One Side Only 

New Oxford, U. S. A., June-July 1892. 

"The truth is," said the man in the train, "that we 
live in a tropical country for three months of the 
year, only we won't recognize it. Look at this." He 
handed over a long list of deaths from heat that 
enlivened the newspapers. All the cities where 
men live at breaking-strain were sending in their 
butcher-bills, and the papers of the cities, themselves 
apostles of the Gospel of Rush, were beseeching 
their readers to keep cool and not to overwork 
themselves while the hot wave was upon them. 
The rivers were patched and barred with sun-dried 
pebbles; the logs and loggers were drought-bound 
somewhere up the Connecticut; and the grass at 
the side of the track was burned in a hundred 
places by the sparks from locomotives. Men — 
hatless, coatless, and gasping — lay in the shade of 
that station where only a few months ago the glass 
stood at 30 below zero. Now the readings were 98 
degrees in the shade. Main Street — do you remem- 
ber Main Street of a little village locked up in the 
snow this spring? 1 — had given up the business of life, 
and an American flag with some politician's name 
1 See "In Sight of Monadnock." 

95 



96 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

printed across the bottom hung down across the 
street as stiff as a board. There were men with 
fans and alpaca coats curled up in splint chairs in the 
verandah of the one hotel — among them an ex- 
President of the United States. He completed 
the impression that the furniture of the entire 
country had been turned out of doors for summer 
cleaning in the absence of all the inhabitants. Noth- 
ing looks so hopelessly "ex" as a President "returned 
to stores." The stars and stripes signified that the 
Presidential Campaign had opened in Main Street — 
opened and shut up again. Politics evaporate at 
summer heat when all hands are busy with the last 
of the hay, and, as the farmers put it, "Vermont's 
bound to go Republican. " The custom of the land 
is to drag the scuffle and dust of an election over 
several months — to the improvement of business and 
manners; but the noise of that war comes faintly up 
the valley of the Connecticut and is lost among the 
fiddling of the locusts. Their music puts, as it 
were, a knife-edge upon the heat of the day. In 
truth, it is a tropical country for the time being. 
Thunderstorms prowl and growl round the belted 
hills, spit themselves away in a few drops of rain, 
and leave the air more dead than before. In the 
woods, where even the faithful springs are beginning 
to run low, the pines and balsams have thrown out 
all their fragrance upon the heat and wait for the 
wind to bring news of the rain. The clematis, wild 



ON ONE SIDE ONLY 97 

carrot, and all the gipsy-flowers camped by sufferance 
between fence line and road rut are masked in white 
dust, and the goldenrod of the pastures that are 
burned to flax-colour burns too like burnished brass. 
A pillar of dust on the long hog-back of the road 
across the hills shows where a team is lathering 
between farms, and the roofs of the wooden houses 
flicker in the haze of their own heat. Overhead the 
chicken-hawk is the only creature at work, and his 
shrill kite-like call sends the gaping chickens from 
the dust-bath in haste to their mothers. The red 
squirrel as usual feigns business of importance 
among the butternuts, but this is pure priggishness. 
When the passer-by is gone he ceases chattering and 
climbs back to where the little breezes can stir his 
tail plumes. From somewhere under the lazy fold of 
a meadow comes the drone of a mowing-machine 
among the hay — its zvhurr-ao, and the grunt of the 
tired horses. 

Houses are only meant to eat and sleep in. The 
rest of life is lived at full length in the verandah. 
When traffic is brisk three whole teams will pass that 
verandah in one day, and it is necessary to exchange 
news about the weather and the prospects for oats. 
When oats* are in there will be slack time on the 
farm, and the farmers will seriously think of doing 
the hundred things that they have let slide during the 
summer. They will undertake this and that, "when 
they get around to it." The phrase translated is the 



98 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

exact equivalent to the manana of the Spaniard, 
the kul hojaiga of Upper India, the yuroshii of the 
Japanese, and the long drawled taihoa of the Maori. 
The only person who "gets around" in this weather 
is the summer boarder — the refugee from the burning 
cities of the Plain, and she is generally a woman. 
She walks, and botanizes, and kodaks, and strips the 
bark off the white birch to make blue-ribboned 
waste-paper baskets, and the farmer regards her 
with wonder. More does he wonder still at the city 
clerk in a blazer, who has two weeks' holiday in the 
year and, apparently, unlimited money, which he 
earns in the easiest possible way by "sitting at a 
desk and writing." The farmer's wife sees the 
fashions of the summer boarder, and between them 
man and woman get a notion of the beauties of city 
life for which their children may live to blame them. 
The blazer and the town-made gown are innocent 
recruiting sergeants for the city brigades; and since 
one man's profession is ever a mystery to his fellow, 
blazer and gown believe that the farmer must be 
happy and content. A summer resort is one of the 
thousand windows whence to watch the thousand 
aspects of life in the Atlantic States. Remember 
that between June and September it is the desire of 
all who can to get away from the big cities — not on 
account of wantonness, as people leave London — but 
because of actual heat. So they get away in their 
millions with their millions — the wives of the rich 



ON ONE SIDE ONLY 99 

men for five clear months, the others for as long as 
they can; and, like drawing like, they make com- 
munities set by set, breed by breed, division by 
division, over the length and breadth of the land — 
from Maine and the upper reaches of the Saguenay, 
through the mountains and hot springs of half-a- 
dozen interior States, out and away to Sitka in 
steamers. Then they spend money on hotel bills, 
among ten thousand farms, on private companies 
who lease and stock land for sporting purposes, on 
yachts and canoes, bicycles, rods, chalets, cottages, 
reading-circles, camps, tents, and all the luxuries 
they know. But the luxury of rest most of them do 
not know; and the telephone and telegraph are 
faithfully dragged after them, lest their men-folk 
should for a moment forget the ball and chain at 
foot. 

For sadness with laughter at bottom there are 
few things to compare with the sight of a coatless, 
muddy-booted millionaire, his hat adorned with 
trout-flies, and a string of small fish in his hand, 
clawing wildly at the telephone of some back-of- 
beyond "health resort." Thus: 

"Hello! Hello! Yes. Who's there? Oh, all 
right. Go ahead. Yes, it's me! Hey, what? Re- 
peat. Sold for how much? Forty-four and a half? 
Repeat. No! I told you to hold on. What? 
What? Who bought at that? Say, hold a minute. 
Cable the other side. No. Hold on. Pll come 



ioo FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

down. (Business with watch.) "Tell Schaefer I'll 
see him to-morrow." (Over his shoulder to his wije y 
who wears half -hoop diamond rings at 10 A. M.) 
"Lizzie, where's my grip? I've got to go down." 

And he goes down to eat in a hotel and sleep in 
his shut-up house. Men are as scarce at most of the 
summer places as they are in Indian hill-stations in 
late April. The women tell you that they can't get 
away, and if they did they would only be miserable 
to get back. Now whether this wholesale abandon- 
ment of husbands by wives is wholesome let those 
who know the beauties of the Anglo-Indian system 
settle for themselves. 

That both men and women need rest very badly a 
glance at the crowded hotel tables makes plain — 
so plain, indeed, that the foreigner who has not been 
taught that fuss and worry are in themselves honour- 
able wishes sometimes he could put the whole unrest- 
ful crowd to sleep for seventeen hours a day. I have 
inquired of not less than five hundred men and 
women in various parts of the State why they broke 
down and looked so gash. And the men said: "If 
you don't keep up with the procession in America 
you are left"; and the women smiled an evil smile and 
answered that no outsider yet had discovered the 
real cause of their worry and strain, or why their 
lives were arranged to work with the largest amount 
of friction in the shortest given time. Now, the 
men can be left to their own folly, but the cause of 



ON ONE SIDE ONLY 101 

the women's trouble has been revealed to me. It is 
the thing called "Help" which is no help. In the 
multitude of presents that the American man has 
given to the American woman (for details see daily 
papers) he has forgotten or is unable to give her 
good servants, and that sordid trouble runs equally 
through the household of the millionaire or the flat of 
the small city man. "Yes, it's easy enough to 
laugh," said one woman passionately, "we are worn 
out, and our children are worn out too, and we're 
always worrying, I know it. What can we do? 
If you stay here you'll know that this is the land of 
all the luxuries and none of the necessities. You'll 
know and then you won't laugh. You'll know why 
women are said to take their husbands to boarding- 
houses and never have homes. You'll know what 
an Irish Catholic means. The men won't get up and 
attend to these things, but we would. If we had 
female suffrage, we'd shut the door to all the Irish and 
throw it open to all the Chinese, and let the women 
have a little protection." It was the cry of a soul 
worn thin with exasperation, but it was truth. 
To-day I do not laugh any more at the race that 
depends on inefficient helot races for its inefficient 
service. When next, you, housekeeping in England 
differ with the respectable, amiable, industrious 
sixteen-pound maid, who wears a cap and says 
"Ma'am," remember the pauper labour of America — 
the wives of the sixty million kings who have no 



102 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

subjects. No man could get a thorough knowledge 
of the problem in one lifetime, but he could guess at 
the size and the import of it after he has descended 
into the arena and wrestled with the Swede and the 
Dane and the German and the unspeakable Celt. 
Then he perceives how good for the breed it must be 
that a man should thresh himself to pieces in naked 
competition with his neighbour while his wife 
struggles unceasingly over primitive savagery in the 
kitchen. In India sometimes when a famine is at 
hand the life of the land starts up before your eyes in 
all its bareness and bitter stress. Here, in spite of 
the trimmings and the frillings, it refuses to be 
subdued and the clamour and the clatter of it are 
loud above all other sounds — as sometimes the 
thunder of disorganized engines stops conversations 
along the decks of a liner, and in the inquiring eyes 
of the passengers you read the question — "This 
thing is made and paid to bear us to port quietly. 
Why does it not do so ? " Only here the rattle of the 
badly-put-together machine is always in the ears, 
though men and women run about with labour-saving 
appliances and gospels of "power through repose," 
tinkering and oiling and making more noise. The 
machine is new. Some day it is going to be the 
finest machine in the world. To the ranks of the 
amateur artificers, therefore, are added men with 
notebooks tapping at every nut and bolthead, 
fiddling with the glands, registering revolutions, and 



ON ONE SIDE ONLY 103 

crying out from time to time that this or that is or 
is not " distinctively American/' Meantime, men and 
women die unnecessarily in the wheels, and they are 
said to have fallen "in the battle of life." 

The God Who sees us all die knows that there is 
far too much of that battle, but we do not, and so 
continue worshipping the knife that cuts and the 
wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast 
sweeper worships Lai-Beg the Glorified Broom that 
is the incarnation of his craft. But the sweeper has 
sense enough not to kill himself, and to be proud of 
it, with sweeping. 

A foreigner can do little good by talking of these 
things; for the same lean dry blood that breeds the 
fever of unrest breeds also the savage parochial 
pride that squeals under a steady stare or a pointed 
finger. Among themselves the people of the Eastern 
cities admit that they and their womenfolk overwork 
grievously and go to pieces very readily, and that the 
consequences for the young stock are unpleasant 
indeed; but before the stranger they prefer to talk 
about the future of their mighty continent (which has 
nothing to do with the case) and to call aloud on 
Baal of the Dollars — to catalogue their lines, mines, 
telephones, banks, and cities, and all the other shells, 
buttons, and counters that they have made their 
gods over them. Now a nation does not progress 
upon its brain-pan, as some books would have us 
believe, but upon its belly as did the Serpent of old; 



104 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

and in the very long run the work of the brain comes 
to be gathered in by a slow-footed breed that have 
unimaginative stomachs and the nerves that know 
their place. 

All this is very consoling from the alien's point 
of view. He perceives, with great comfort, that out 
of strain is bred impatience in the shape of a young 
bundle of nerves, who is about as undisciplined an 
imp as the earth can show. Out of impatience, 
grown up, habituated to violent and ugly talk, and 
the impatience and recklessness of his neighbours, 
is begotten lawlessness, encouraged by laziness and 
suppressed by violence when it becomes insupport- 
able. Out of lawlessness is bred rebellion (and that 
fruit has been tasted once already), and out of re- 
bellion comes profit to those who wait. He hears 
of the power of the People who, through rank sloven- 
liness, neglect to see that their laws are soberly en- 
forced from the beginning; and these people, not 
once or twice in a year, but many times within a 
month, go out in the open streets and with a maxi- 
mum waste of power and shouting strangle other 
people with ropes. They are, he is told, law-abid- 
ing citizens who have executed "the will of the 
people"; which is as though a man should leave his 
papers unsorted for a year and then smash his desk 
with an axe, crying, "Am I not orderly?' He hears 
lawyers, otherwise sane and matured, defend this 
pig-jobbing murder on the grounds that "the people 



ON ONE SIDE ONLY io S 

stand behind the law" — the law that they never 
administered. He sees a right, at present only half 
— but still half — conceded to anticipate the law in 
one's own interests; and nervous impatience (always 
nerves) forejudging the suspect in jail, the prisoner 
in the dock, and the award between nation and nation 
ere it is declared- He knows that the maxim in 
London, Yokohoma, and Hongkong in doing business 
with the pure-bred American is to keep him waiting, 
for the reason that forced inaction frets the man to a 
lather, as standing in harness frets a half-broken 
horse. He comes across a thousand little peculiari- 
ties of speech, manner, and thought — matters of 
nerve and stomach developed by everlasting friction 
—and they are all just the least little bit in the world 
lawless, no more than the restless clicking together 
of horns in a herd of restless cattle, but certainly 
no less. They are all good — good for those who wait. 
On the other hand, to consider the matter more 
humanly, there are thousands of delightful men 
and women going to pieces for the pitiful reason 
that if they do not keep up with the procession, 
"they are left." And they are left — in clothes that 
have no back to them, among mounds of smilax. 
And young men — chance-met in the streets, talk 
to you about their nerves which are things no young 
man should know anything about; and the friends of 
your friends go down with nervous prostration, and 
the people overheard in the trains talk about their 



106 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

nerves and the nerves of their relatives; and the 
little children must needs have their nerves attended 
to ere their milk teeth are shed, and the middle-aged 
women and the middle-aged men have got them 
too, and the old men lose the dignity of their age 
in an indecent restlessness, and the advertisements 
in the papers go to show that this sweeping list 
is no lie. Atop of the fret and the stampede the 
tingling self-consciousness of a new people makes 
them take a sort of perverted pride in the futile 
racket that sends up the death-rate — a child's 
delight in the blaze and the dust of the March 
of Progress. Is it not "distinctively American"? 
It is, and it is not. If the cities were all America, 
as they pretend, fifty years would see the March 
of Progress brought to a standstill, as a locomotive 
is stopped by heated bearings. . . . 

Down in the meadow the mowing-machine has 
checked, and the horses are shaking themselves. 
The last of the sunlight leaves the top of Monadnock, 
and four miles away Main Street lights her electric 
lamps. It is band-night in Main Street, and the 
folks from Putney, from Marlboro', from Guildford, 
and even New Fane will drive in their well-filled 
waggons to hear music and look at the Ex-President. 
Over the shoulder of the meadow two men come up 
very slowly, their hats off and their arms swinging 
loosely at their sides. They do not hurry, they 
have not hurried, and they never will hurry, for 



ON ONE SIDE ONLY 107 

they are of country — bankers of the flesh and blood 
of the ever bankrupt cities. Their children may 
yet be pale summer boarders, as the boarders, city- 
bred weeds, may take over their farms. From the 
plough to the pavement goes man, but to the plough 
he returns at last. 
" Going to supper?" 

" Ye-ep," very slowly across the wash of the uncut 
grass. 

"Say, that corncrib wants painting." 
"Do that when we get around to it." 
They go ofF through the dusk, without farewell 
or salutation steadily as their own steers. And there 
are a few millions of them — unhandy men to cross 
in their ways, set, silent, indirect in speech, and as 
impenetrable as that other Eastern farmer who is 
the bedrock of another land. They do not appear 
in the city papers, they are not much heard in the 
streets, and they tell very little in the outsider's esti- 
mate of America. 
And they are the American. 



Leaves from a Winter Note-Book 

(189s) 

We had walked abreast of the year from the very 
beginning, and that was when the first blood-root 
came up between the patches of April snow, while 
yet the big drift at the bottom of the meadow held 
fast. In the shadow of the woods and under the 
blown pine-needles clots of snow lay till far into May, 
but neither the season nor the flowers took any note 
of them, and, before we were well sure Winter had 
gone, the lackeys of my Lord Baltimore in their new 
liveries came to tell us that Summer was in the val- 
ley, and please might they nest at the bottom of the 
garden ? 

Followed, Summer, angry, fidgety, and nervous, 
with the corn and tobacco to ripen in five short 
months, the pastures to reclothe, and the fallen leaves 
to hide away under new carpets. Suddenly, in the 
middle of her work, on a stuffy-still July day, she 
called a wind out of the Northwest, a wind blown 
under an arch of steel-bellied clouds, a wicked bitter 
wind with a lacing of hail to it, a wind that came 
and was gone in less than ten minutes, but blocked 
the roads with fallen trees, toppled over a barn, and 

108 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 109 

— blew potatoes out of the ground! When that was 
done, a white cloud shaped like a dumb-bell whirled 
down the valley across the evening blue, roaring and 
twisting and twisting and roaring all alone by itself. 
A West Indian hurricane could not have been quicker 
on its feet than our little cyclone, and when the 
house rose a-tiptoe, like a cockerel in act to crow, 
and a sixty-foot elm went by the board, and that 
which had been a dusty road became a roaring tor- 
rent all in three minutes, we felt that the New Eng- 
land Summer had Creole blood in her veins. She 
went away, red-faced and angry to the last, slamming 
all the doors of the hills behind her, and Autumn, who 
is a lady, took charge. 

No pen can describe the turning of the leaves — 
the insurrection of the tree-people against the waning 
year. A little maple began it, flaming blood-red 
of a sudden where he stood against the dark green of 
a pine-belt. Next morning there was an answering 
signal from the swamp where the sumacs grow. 
Three days later, the hill-sides as far as the eye could 
range were afire, and the roads paved, with crimson 
and gold. Then a wet wind blew, and ruined all 
the uniforms of that gorgeous host; and the oaks, 
who had held themselves in reserve, buckled on their 
dull and bronzed cuirasses and stood it out stiffly 
to the last blown leaf, till nothing remained but 
pencil-shading of bare boughs, and one could see into 
the most private heart of the woods. 



no FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

Frost may be looked for till the middle of May 
and after the middle of September, so Summer 
has little time for enamel-work or leaf-embroidery. 
Her sisters bring the gifts — Spring, wind-flowers, 
Solomon's-Seal, Dutchman's-breeches, Quaker-ladies, 
and trailing arbutus, that smells as divinely as the 
true May. Autumn has goldenrod and all the 
tribe of asters, pink, lilac, and creamy white, by the 
double armful. When these go the curtain comes 
down, and whatever Powers shift the scenery behind, 
work without noise. In tropic lands you can hear 
the play of growth and decay at the back of the night- 
silences. Even in England the tides of the winter air 
have a set and a purpose; but here they are dumb 
altogether. The very last piece of benchwork this 
season was the trailed end of a blackberry-vine, most 
daringly conventionalized in hammered iron, flung 
down on the frosty grass an instant before people 
came to look. The blue bloom of the furnace was 
still dying along the central rib, and the side sprays 
were cherry red, even as they had been lifted from the 
charcoal. It was a detail, evidently, of some in- 
visible gate in the woods; but we never found that 
workman, though he had left the mark of his cloven 
foot as plainly as any strayed deer. In a week 
the heavy frosts with scythes and hammers had 
slashed and knocked down all the road-side growth 
and the kindly bushes that veil the drop off the un- 
fenced track. 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK in 

There the seasons stopped awhile. Autumn was 
gone, Winter was not. We had Time dealt out to 
us— more, clear, fresh Time— grace-days to enjoy. 
The white wooden farmhouses were banked round 
two feet deep with dried leaves or earth, and the 
choppers went out to get ready next year's stores 
of wood. Now, chopping is an art, and the chopper 
in all respects an artist. He makes his own axe- 
helve, and for each man there is but one perfect piece 
of wood in all the world. This he never finds, but 
the likest substitute is trimmed and balanced and 
poised to that ideal. One man I know has evolved 
very nearly the weapon of Umslopogaas. It is 
almost straight, lapped at the butt with leather, 
amazingly springy, and carries a two-edged blade 
for splitting and chopping. If his Demon be with 
him — and what artist can answer for all his moods ? — 
he will cause a tree to fall upon any stick or stone 
that you choose, uphill or down, to the right or to 
the left. Artist-like, however, he explains that that 
is nothing. Any fool can play with a tree in the 
open, but it needs the craftsman to bring a tree down 
in thick timber and do no harm. To see an eighty- 
foot maple, four feet in the butt, dropped, deftly 
as a fly is cast, in the only place where it will not 
outrage the feelings and swipe off the tops of fifty 
juniors, is a revelation. White pine, hemlock, and 
spruce share this country with maples, black and 
white birches, and beech. Maple seems to have 



ii2 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

few preferences, and the white birches straggle 
and shiver on the outskirts of every camp; but 
the pines hold together in solid regiments, send- 
ing out skirmishers to invade a neglected past- 
ure on the first opportunity. There is no over- 
coat warmer than the pines in a gale when the 
woods for miles round are singing like cathedral 
organs, and the first snow of the year powders the 
rock ledges. 

The mosses and lichens, green, sulphur, and 
amber, stud the copper floor of needles, where 
the feathery ground-pine runs aimlessly to and 
fro along the ground, spelling out broken words 
of half-forgotten charms. There are checker-berries 
on the outskirts of the wood, where the partridge 
(he is a ruffed grouse really) dines, and by the de- 
serted logging-roads toadstools of all colours sprout 
on the decayed stumps. Wherever a green or blue 
rock lifts from the hillside, the needles have been 
packed and matted round its base, till, when the 
sunshine catches them, stone and setting together 
look no meaner than turquoise in dead gold. The 
woods are full of colour, belts and blotches of it, 
the colours of the savage — red, yellow, and blue. 
Yet in their lodges there is very little life, for the 
wood-people do not readily go into the shadows. 
The squirrels have their business among the beeches 
and hickories by the road-side, where they can watch 
the traffic and talk. We have no gray ones here- 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 113 

abouts (they are good to eat and suffer for it), but 
five reds live in a hickory hard by, and no weather 
puts them to sleep. The woodchuck, a marmot and 
a strategist, makes his burrow in the middle of a field, 
where he must see you ere you see him. Now and 
again a dog manages to cut him off his base, and the 
battle is worth crossing fields to watch. But the 
woodchuck turned in long ago, and will not be 
out till April. The coon lives — well, no one seems 
to know particularly where Brer Coon lives, but 
when the Hunter's Moon is large and full he descends 
into the corn-lands, and men chase him with 
dogs for his fur, which makes the finest kind of 
overcoat, and his flesh, which tastes like chick- 
ens. He cries at night sorrowfully as though a child 
were lost. 

They seem to kill, for one reason or other, every- 
thing that moves in this land. Hawks, of course; 
eagles for their rarity; foxes for their pelts; red- 
shouldered blackbirds and Baltimore orioles because 
they are pretty, and the other small things for sport — 
French fashion. You can get a rifle of a kind for 
twelve shillings, and if your neighbour be fool enough 
to post notices forbidding "hunting" and fishing, 
you naturally seek his woods. So the country is very 
silent and unalive. 

There are, however, bears within a few miles, as 
you will see from this notice, picked up at the local 
tobacconist's : 



ii 4 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

JOHNNY GET YOUR GUN! BEAR HUNT! 

As bears are too numerous in the town of Peltyville Corners, 
Vt., the hunters of the surrounding towns are invited to partici- 
pate in a grand hunt to be held on Blue Mountains in the town 
of Peltyville Corners, Vt., Wednesday, Nov. 8th, if pleasant. If 
not, first fine day. Come one, come all! 

They went, but it was the bear that would not 
participate. The notice was printed at somebody's 
Electric Print Establishment. Queer mixture, isn't 
it? 

The bear does not run large as a rule, but he 
has a weakness for swine and calves which brings 
punishment. Twelve hours' rail and a little march- 
ing take you up to the moose-country; and twenty- 
odd miles from here as the crow flies you come to 
virgin timber, where trappers live, and where there is 
a Lost Pond that many have found once but can 
never find again. 

Men, who are of one blood with sheep, have 
followed their friends and the railway along the 
river valleys where the towns are. Across the 
hills the inhabitants are few, and, outside their 
State, little known. They withdraw from society 
in November if they live on the uplands, coming 
down in May as the snow gives leave. Not much 
more than a generation ago these farms made their 
own clothes, soap, and candles, and killed their own 
meat thrice a year, beef, veal, and pig, and sat still 
between-times. Now they buy shop-made clothes, 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 115 

patent soaps, and kerosene; and it is among their 
tents that the huge red and gilt Biographies of Presi- 
dents, and the twenty-pound family Bible, with il- 
luminated marriage-registers, mourning-cards, bap- 
tismal certificates, and hundreds of genuine steel- 
engravings sell best. Here, too, off the main trav- 
elled roads, the wandering quack — Patent Electric 
Pills, nerve cures, etc. — divides the field with the 
seed and fruit man and the seller of cattle-boluses. 
They dose themselves a good deal, I fancy, for it is a 
poor family that does not know all about nervous- 
prostration. So the quack drives a pair of horses 
and a gaily painted waggon with a hood, and some- 
times takes his wife with him. Once only have I met 
a pedlar afoot. He was an old man, shaken with 
palsy, and he pushed a thing exactly like a pauper's 
burial-cart, selling pins, tape, scents, and flavourings. 
You helped yourself, for his hands had no direction, 
and he told a long tale in which the deeding away of a 
farm to one of his family was mixed up with pride 
at the distances he still could cover daily. As much 
as six miles sometimes. He was no Lear, as the gift 
of the farm might suggest, but sealed of the tribe of 
the Wandering Jew — a tremulous old giddy-gaddy. 
There are many such rovers, gelders of colts and the 
like, who work a long beat, south to Virginia almost, 
and north to the frontier, paying with talk and gossip 
for their entertainment. 

Yet tramps are few, and that is well, for the Ameri- 



n6 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

can article answers almost exactly to the vagrant 
and criminal tribes of India, being a predatory ruffian 
who knows too much to work. Bad place to beg in 
after dark — on a farm — very — is Vermont. Gypsies 
pitch their camp by the river in the spring, and cooper 
horses in the manner of their tribe. They have the 
gypsy look and some of the old gypsy names, but 
say that they are largely mixed with Gentile blood. 

Winter has chased all these really interesting 
people south, and in a few weeks, if we have anything 
of a snow, the back farms will be unvisited save by 
the doctor's hooded sleigh. It is no child's play to 
hold a practice here through the winter months, when 
the drifts are really formed, and a pair can drop in 
up to their saddle-pads. Four horses a day some of 
them use, and use up — for they are good men. 

Now in the big silence of the snow is born, per- 
haps, not a little of New England conscience which 
her children write about. There is much time to 
think, and thinking is a highly dangerous business. 
Conscience, fear, undigested reading, and, it may 
be, not too well cooked food, have full swing. A 
man, and more particularly a woman, can easily hear 
strange voices — the Word of the Lord rolling between 
the dead hills; may see visions and dream dreams; get 
revelations and an outpouring of the spirit, and 
end (such things have been) lamentably enough 
in those big houses by the Connecticut River which 
have been tenderly christened The Retreat. Hate 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 117 

breeds as well as religion — the deep, instriking hate 
between neighbours, that is born of a hundred little 
things added up, brooded over, and hatched by the 
stove when two or three talk together in the long 
evenings. It would be very interesting to get the 
statistics of revivals and murders, and find how 
many of them have been committed in the spring. 
But for undistracted people winter is one long delight 
of the eye. In other lands one knows the snow as a 
nuisance that comes and goes, and is sorely man- 
handled and messed at the last. Here it lies longer 
on the ground than any crop — from November to 
April sometimes — and for three months life goes to 
the tune of sleigh-bells, which are not, as a Southern 
visitor once hinted, ostentation, but safeguards. 
The man who drives without them is not loved. 
The snow is a faithful barometer, foretelling good 
sleighing or stark confinement to barracks. It is 
all the manure the stony pastures receive; it cloaks 
the ground and prevents the frost bursting pipes; 
it is the best — I had almost written the only — road- 
maker in the States. On the other side it can rise 
up in the night and bid the people sit still as the 
Egyptians. It can stop mails; wipe out all time- 
tables; extinguish the lamps of twenty towns, and 
kill man within sight of his own door-step or hearing 
of his cattle unfed. No one who has been through 
even so modified a blizzard as New England can pro- 
duce talks lightly of the snow, Imagine eight-and- 



u8 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

forty hours of roaring wind, the thermometer well 
down towards zero, scooping and gouging across a 
hundred miles of newly fallen snow. The air is 
full of stinging shot, and at ten yards the trees are 
invisible. The foot slides on a reef, polished and 
black as obsidian, where the wind has skinned an ex- 
posed corner of road down to the dirt ice of early 
winter. The next step ends hip-deep and over, for 
here an unseen wall is banking back the rush of the 
singing drifts. A scarped slope rises sheer across 
the road. The wind shifts a point or two, and all 
sinks down, like sand in the hour-glass, leaving a pot- 
hole of whirling whiteness. There is a lull, and you 
can see the surface of the fields settling furiously 
in one direction — a tide that spurts from between 
the tree-boles. The hollows of the pasture fill 
while you watch; empty, fill, and discharge anew. 
The rock-ledges show the bare flank of a storm- 
chased liner for a moment, and whitening, duck 
under. Irresponsible snow-devils dance by the lee 
of a barn where three gusts meet, or stagger out into 
the open till they are cut down by the main wind. 
At the worst of the storm there is neither Heaven 
nor Earth, but only a swizzle into which a man may 
be brewed. Distances grow to nightmare scale, 
and that which in the summer was no more than 
a minute's bare-headed run, is half an hour's gasping 
struggle, each foot won between the lulls. Then do 
the heavy-timbered barns talk like ships in a cross- 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 119 

sea, beam working against beam. The winter's 
hay is ribbed over with long lines of snow dust blown 
between the boards, and far below in the byre the 
oxen clash their horns and moan uneasily. 

The next day is blue, breathless, and most utterly 
still. The farmers shovel a way to their beasts, 
bind with chains their large ploughshares to their 
heaviest wood-sled and take of oxen as many as 
Allah has given them. These they drive, and the 
dragging share makes a furrow in which a horse 
can walk, and the oxen, by force of repeatedly going 
in up to their bellies, presently find foothold. The 
finished road is a deep double gutter between three- 
foot w^alls of snow, where, by custom, the heavier 
vehicle has the right of way. The lighter man when 
he turns out must drop waist-deep and haul his 
unwilling beast into the drift, leaving Providence to 
steady the sleigh. 

In the towns, where they choke and sputter 
and gasp, the big snow turns to horsepondine. 
With us it stays still; the wind, sun and rain get 
to work upon it, lest the texture and colour should 
not change daily. Rain makes a granulated crust 
over all, in which white shagreen the trees are faintly 
reflected. Heavy mists go up and down, and create 
a sort of mirage, till they settle and pack round the 
iron-tipped hills, and then you know how the moon 
must look to an inhabitant of it. At twilight, again, 
the beaten-down ridges and laps and folds of the up- 



120 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

lands take on the likeness of wet sand — some huge 
and melancholy beach at the world's end — and when 
day meets night it is all goblin country. To west- 
ward, the last of the spent day — rust-red and pearl, 
illimitable levels of shore waiting for the tide to turn 
again. To eastward, black night among the valleys, 
and on the rounded hill in slopes a hard glare that is 
not so much light as snail-slime from the moon. 
Once or twice perhaps in the winter the Northern 
Lights come out between the moon and the sun, so 
that to the two unearthy lights is added the leap 
and flare of the Aurora Borealis. 

In January or February come the great ice- 
storms, when every branch, blade, and trunk is 
coated with frozen rain, so that you can touch noth- 
ing truly. The spikes of the pines are sunk into 
pear-shaped crystals, and each fence-post is miracu- 
lously hiked with diamonds. If you bend a twig, 
the icing cracks like varnish, and a half-inch branch 
snaps off at the lightest tap. If wind and sun open 
the day together, the eye cannot look steadily at 
the splendour of this jewellery. The woods are full 
of the clatter of arms; the ringing of bucks' horns 
in flight; the stampede of mailed feet up and down 
the glades; and a great dust of battle is puffed out 
into the open, till the last of the ice is beaten away 
and the cleared branches take up their regular chant. 

Again the mercury drops twenty and more below 
zero, and the very trees swoon. The snow turns to 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 121 

French chalk, squeaking under the heel, and their 
breath cloaks the oxen in rime. At night a tree's 
heart will break in him with a groan. According to 
the books, the frost has split something, but it is a 
fearful sound, this grunt as of a man stunned. 

Winter that is winter in earnest does not allow 
cattle and horses to play about the fields, so every- 
thing comes home; and since no share can break 
ground to any profit for some five months, there 
would seem to be very little to do. As a matter of 
fact, country interests at all seasons are extensive 
and peculiar, and the day is not long enough for them 
when you take out that time which a self-respecting 
man needs to turn himself round in. Consider! 
The solid undisturbed hours stand about one like 
ramparts. At a certain time the sun will rise. At 
another hour, equally certain, he will set. This 
much we know. Why, in the name of Reason, there- 
fore, should we vex ourselves with vain exertions? 
An occasional visitor from the Cities of the Plains 
comes up panting to do things. He is set down to 
listen to the normal beat of his own heart — a sound 
that very few men have heard. In a few days, when 
the lather of impatience has dried off, he ceases to 
talk of "getting there" or "being left." He does not 
desire to accomplish matters "right away," nor does 
he look at his watch from force of habit, but keeps it 
where it should be — in his stomach. At the last he 
goes back to his beleaguered city, unwillingly, par- 



122 FROM TIDEWAY TO TIDEWAY 

tially civilised, soon to be resavaged by the clash 
of a thousand wars whose echo does not reach here. 

The air which kills germs dries out the very news- 
papers. They might be of to-morrow or a hundred 
years ago. They have nothing to do with to-day — 
the long, full, sunlit to-day. Our interests are not 
on the same scale as theirs, perhaps, but much more 
complex. The movement of a foreign power, an 
alien sleigh on this Pontic shore must be explained 
and accounted for, or this public's heart will burst 
with unsatisfied curiosity. If it be Buck Davis, with 
the white mare that he traded his colt for, and 
the practically new sleigh-robe that he bought at 
Sewell auction, why does Buck Davis, who lives on 
the river flats, cross our hills, unless Murder Hollow 
be blockaded with snow, or unless he has turkeys for 
sale? But Buck Davis with turkeys would surely 
have stopped here, unless he were selling a large stock 
in town. A wail from the sacking at the back of the 
sleigh tells the tale. It is a winter calf, and Buck 
Davis is going to sell it for one dollar to the Boston 
Market where it will be turned into potted chicken. 
This leaves the mystery of his change of route unex- 
plained. After two days' sitting on tenter-hooks 
it is discovered, obliquely, that Buck went to pay a 
door-yard call on Orson Butler, who lives on the 
saeter where the wind and the bald granite scaurs 
fight it out together. Kirk Demming has brought 
Orson news of a fox at the back of Black Mountain, 



FROM A WINTER NOTE-BOOK 123 

and Orson's eldest son, going to Murder Hollow with 
wood for the new barn floor that the widow Amidon 
is laying down, told Buck that he might as well 
come round to talk to his father about the pig. 
But old man Butler meant fox-hunting from the 
first, and what he wanted to do was to borrow Buck's 
dog, who had been duly brought over with the calf, 
and left on the mountain No old man Butler did 
not go hunting alone, but waited till Buck came back 
from town. Buck sold the calf for a dollar and a 
quarter and not for seventy-five cents as was falsely 
asserted by interested parties. Then the two went 
after the fox together. This much learned, every- 
body breathes freely, if life has not been compli- 
cated in the meantime by more strange counter- 
marchings. 

Five or six sleighs a day we can understand, if we 
know why they are abroad; but a metropolitan rush 
of traffic disturbs and excites. 



LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

1908 

These letters appeared in newspapers during the 
spring of 1908 after a trip to Canada undertaken in 
the autumn of 1907. They are now reprinted with- 
out alteration. 

The Road to Quebec. 
A People at Home. 
Cities and Spaces. 
Newspapers and Democracy. 
Labour. 

Fortunate Towns. 
Mountains and the Pacific. 
A Conclusion. 



The Road to Quebec 

(1907) 

It must be hard for those who do not live there 
to realize the cross between canker and blight that 
has settled on England for the last couple of years. 
The effects of it are felt throughout the Empire, 
but at headquarters we taste the stuff in the very 
air, just as one tastes iodoform in the cups and bread- 
and-butter of a hospital-tea. So far as one can come 
at things in the present fog, every form of unfitness, 
general or specialized, born or created, during the 
last generation has combined in one big trust — a 
majority of all the minorities — to play the game of 
Government. Now that the game ceases to amuse, 
nine-tenths of the English who set these folk in power 
are crying, "If we had only known what they were 
going to do we should never have voted for them!" 
Yet, as the rest of the Empire perceived at the 
time, these men were always perfectly explicit as to 
their emotions and intentions. They said first, 
and drove it home by large pictures, that no possible 
advantage to the Empire outweighed the cruelty and 
injustice of charging the British working man two- 
pence halfpenny a week on some of his provisions. 
Incidentally they explained, so that all Earth except 

127 



128 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

England heard it, that the Army was wicked; much 
of the Navy unnecessary; that half the population 
of one of the Colonies practised slavery, with torture, 
for the sake of private gain, and that the mere name 
of Empire wearied and sickened them. On these 
grounds they stood to save England; on these 
grounds they were elected, with what seemed like 
clear orders to destroy the blood-stained fetish 
of Empire as soon as possible. The present mellow 
condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa 
is proof of their honesty and obedience. Over and 
above this, their mere presence in office produced 
all along our lines the same moral effect as the pres- 
ence of an incompetent master in a classroom. Paper 
pellets, books, and ink began to fly; desks were 
thumped; dirty pens were jabbed into those trying 
to work; rats and mice were set free amid squeals of 
exaggerated fear; and, as usual, the least desirable 
characters in the forms were loudest to profess noble 
sentiments, and most eloquent grief at being mis- 
judged. Still, the English are not happy, and the 
unrest and slackness increase. 

On the other hand, which is to our advantage, 
the isolation of the unfit in one political party has 
thrown up the extremists in what the Babu called 
"all their naked cut bono." These last are after 
satisfying the two chief desires of primitive man 
by the very latest gadgets in scientific legislation. 
But how to get free food, and free — shall we say 



THE ROAD TO QUEBEC 129 

— love ? within the four corners of an Act of Parlia- 
ment without giving the game away too grossly, 
worries them a little. It is easy enough to laugh at 
this, but we are all so knit together nowadays that a 
rot at what is called "headquarters" may spread 
like bubonic, with every steamer. I went across to 
Canada the other day, for a few weeks, mainly to 
escape the Blight, and also to see what our Eldest 
Sister was doing. Have you ever noticed that Can- 
ada has to deal in the lump with most of the problems 
that afflict us others severally? For example, she 
has the Double-Language, Double-Law, Double- 
Politics drawback in a worse form than South Africa, 
because, unlike our Dutch, her French cannot well 
marry outside their religion, and they take their 
orders from Italy — less central, sometimes, than Pre- 
toria or Stellenbosch. She has too, something of 
Australia's labour fuss, minus Australia's isolation, 
but plus the open and secret influence of "Labour," 
entrenched, with arms, and high explosives on neigh- 
bouring soil. To complete the parallel, she keeps, 
tucked away behind mountains, a trifle of land called 
British Columbia, which resembles New Zealand; 
and New Zealanders who do not find much scope for 
young enterprise in their own country are drifting 
up to British Columbia already. 

Canada has in her time known calamity more 
serious than floods, frost, drought, and fire — and 
has macadamized some stretches of her road towards 



i 3 o LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

nationhood with the broken hearts of two genera- 
tions. That is why one can discuss with Canadians 
of the old stock matters which an Australian or New 
Zealander could no more understand than a healthy 
child understands death. Truly we are an odd 
Family! Australia and New Zealand (the Maori 
War not counted) got everything for nothing. 
South Africa gave everything and got less than noth- 
ing. Canada has given and taken all along the line 
for nigh on three hundred years, and in some re- 
spects is the wisest, as she should be the happiest, of 
us all. She seems to be curiously unconscious of her 
position in the Empire, perhaps because she has 
lately been talked at, or down to, by her neighbours. 
You know how at any gathering of our men from all 
quarters it is tacitly conceded that Canada takes 
the lead in the Imperial game. To put it roughly, 
she saw the goal more than ten years ago, and has 
been working the ball towards it ever since. That 
is why her inaction at the last Imperial Conference 
made people who were interested in the play wonder 
why she, of all of us, chose to brigade herself with 
General Botha and to block the forward rush. I, 
too, asked that question of many. The answer was 
something like this: "We saw that England wasn't 
taking anything just then. Why should we have 
laid ourselves open to be snubbed worse than we 
were? We sat still/' Quite reasonable — almost 
too convincing. There was really no need that Can- 



THE ROAD TO QUEBEC 131 

ada should have done other than she did — except 
that she was the Eldest Sister, and more was ex- 
pected of her. She is a little too modest. 

We discussed this, first of all, under the lee of a 
wet deck-house in mid-Atlantic; man after man cut- 
ting in and out of the talk as he sucked at his damp 
tobacco. The passengers were nearly all unmixed 
Canadian, mostly born in the Maritime Provinces, 
where their fathers speak of "Canada" as Sussex 
speaks of "England," but scattered about their 
businesses throughout the wide Dominion. They 
were at ease, too, among themselves, with that pleas- 
ant intimacy that stamps every branch of Our Family 
and every boat that it uses on its homeward way. 
A Cape liner is all the sub-Continent from the Equa- 
tor to Simon's Town; an Orient boat is Australasian 
throughout, and a C.P.R. steamer cannot be con- 
fused with anything except Canada. It is a pity 
one may not be born in four places at once, and then 
one would understand the half-tones and asides, and 
the allusions of all our Family life without waste of 
precious time. These big men, smoking in the driz- 
zle, had hope in their eyes, belief in their tongues, and 
strength in their hearts. I used to think miserably 
of other boats at the South end of this ocean — a 
quarter full of people deprived of these things. A 
young man kindly explained to me how Canada had 
suffered through what he called "the Imperial 
connection"; how she had been diversely bedevilled 



i 3 2 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

by English statesmen for political reasons. He did 
not know his luck, nor would he believe me when I 
tried to point it out; but a nice man in a plaid (who 
knew South Africa) lurched round the corner and 
fell on him with facts and imagery which astonished 
the patriotic young mind. The plaid finished his 
outburst with the uncontradicted statement that the 
English were mad. All our talks ended on that note. 
It was an experience to move in the midst of a 
new contempt. One understands and accepts the 
bitter scorn of the Dutch, the hopeless anger of 
one's own race in South Africa is also part of the 
burden; but the Canadian's profound, sometimes 
humorous, often bewildered, always polite contempt 
of the England of to-day cuts a little. You see, that 
late unfashionable war 1 was very real to Canada. 
She sent several men to it, and a thinly-populated 
country is apt to miss her dead more than a crowded 
one. When, from her point of view, they have died 
for no conceivable advantage, moral or material, 
her business instincts, or it may be mere animal love 
of her children, cause her to remember and resent 
quite a long time after the thing should be decently 
forgotten. I was shocked at the vehemence with 
which some men (and women) spoke of the affair. 
Some of them went so far as to discuss — on the ship 
and elsewhere — whether England would stay in the 
Family or whether, as some eminent statesman was 

1 Boer "war" of 1899-1902. 



THE ROAD TO QUEBEC 133 

said to have asserted in private talk, she would cut 
the painter to save expense. One man argued, with- 
out any heat, that she would not so much break out 
of the Empire in one flurry, as politically vend her 
children one by one to the nearest Power that threat- 
ened her comfort, the sale of each case to be preceded 
by a steady blast of abuse of the chosen victim. 
He quoted — really these people have viciously 
long memories! — the five-year campaign of abuse 
against South Africa as a precedent and a warning. 

Our Tobacco Parliament next set itself to con- 
sider by what means, if this happened, Canada could 
keep her identity unsubmerged; and that led to one 
of the most curious talks I have ever heard. It 
seemed to be decided that she might — just might — 
pull through by the skin of her teeth as a nation — 
if (but this was doubtful) England did not help others 
to hammer her. Now, twenty years ago one would 
not have heard any of this sort of thing. If it 
sounds a little mad, remember that the Mother 
Country was throughout considered as a lady in vio- 
lent hysterics. 

Just at .the end of the talk one of our twelve or 
thirteen hundred steerage-passengers leaped over- 
board, ulstered and booted, into a confused and bit- 
ter cold sea. Every horror in the world has its 
fitting ritual. For the fifth time — and four times 
in just such weather — I heard the screw stop; saw 
our wake curve like a whiplash as the great town- 



i 3 4 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

ship wrenched herself round; the lifeboat's crew 
hurry to the boat-deck; the bare-headed officer race 
up the shrouds and look for any sign of the poor head 
that had valued itself so lightly. A boat amid waves 
can see nothing. There was nothing to see from the 
first. We waited and quartered the ground back 
and forth for a long hour, while the rain fell and 
the seas slapped along our sides, and the steam flut- 
tered drearily through the escapes. Then we went 
ahead. 

The St. Lawrence on the last day of the voyage 
played up nobly. The maples along its banks had 
turned — blood red and splendid as the banners of 
lost youth. Even the oak is not more of a national 
tree than the maple, and the sight of its welcome 
made the folks aboard still more happy. A dry wind 
brought along all the clean smell of their Continent- 
mixed odours of sawn umber, virgin earth, and wood- 
smoke; and they snuffed it, and their eyes softened as 
they identified point after point along their own 
beloved river — places where they played and fished 
and amused themselves jn holiday time. It must be 
pleasant to have a country of ones very own to show 
off. Understand, they did not in any way boast, 
shout, squeak, or exclaim, these even-voiced returned 
men and women. They were simply and unfeignedly 
glad to see home again, and they said: " Isn't it 
lovely? Don't you think it's beautiful? We love 



it." 



THE ROAD TO QUEBEC 135 

At Quebec there is a sort of place, much infested 
by locomotives, like a coal-chute whence rise the 
heights that Wolfe's men scaled on their way to the 
Plains of Abraham. Perhaps of all the tide-marks 
in all our lands the affair of Quebec touches the heart 
and the eye more nearly than any other. Every- 
thing meets there; France, the jealous partner of 
England's glory by land and sea for eight hundred 
years; England, bewildered as usual, but for a won- 
der not openly opposing Pitt, who knew; those other 
people, destined to break from England as soon as the 
French peril was removed; Montcalm himself, 
doomed and resolute; Wolfe, the inevitable trained 
workman appointed for the finish; and somewhere in 
the background one James Cook, master of H. M. S. 
Mercury, making beautiful and delicate charts of the 
St. Lawrence River. 

For these reasons the Plains of Abraham are 
crowned with all sorts of beautiful things — including 
a jail and a factory. Montcalm's left wing is marked 
by the jail, and Wolfe's right by the factory. There 
is, happily, now a movement on foot to abolish these 
adornments and turn the battle-field and its sur- 
roundings into a park, which by nature and asso- 
ciation would be one of the most beautiful in our 
world. 

Yet, in spite of jails on the one side and convents 
on the other and the thin black wreck of the Quebec 
Railway Bridge, lying like a dumped car-load of tin 



136 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

cans in the river, the Eastern Gate to Canada is noble 
with a dignity beyond words. We saw it very early, 
when the under sides of the clouds turned chilly pink 
over a high-piled, brooding, dusky-purple city. Just 
at the point of dawn, what looked like the Sultan 
Harun-al-Raschid's own private shallop, all spangled 
with coloured lights, stole across the iron-gray water, 
and disappeared into the darkness of a slip. She 
came out again in three minutes, but the full day 
had come too; so she snapped off her masthead, steer- 
ing and cabin electrics, and turned into a dingy 
white ferry-boat, full of cold passengers. I spoke to a 
Canadian about her. "Why, she's the old So-and- 
So, to Port Levis/' he answered, wondering as the 
Cockney wonders when a stranger stares at an 
Inner Circle train. This was his Inner Circle — the 
Zion where he was all at ease. He drew my attention 
to stately city and stately river with the same tran- 
quil pride that we each feel when the visitor steps 
across our threshold, whether that be Southampton 
Water on a gray, wavy morning; Sydney Harbour 
with a regatta in full swing; or Table Mountain, 
radiant and new-washed after the Christmas rains. 
He had, quite rightly, felt personally responsible for 
the weather, and every flaming stretch of maple 
since we had entered the river. (The North-wester 
in these parts is equivalent to the South-easter else- 
where, and may impress a guest unfavourably.) 
Then the autumn sun rose, and the man smiled. 



THE ROAD TO QUEBEC 137 

Personally and politically he said he loathed the 
city — but it was his. 

"Well," he asked at last, "what do you think? 
Not so bad?" 

"Oh no. Not at all so bad," I answered; and 
it wasn't till much later that I realised that we had 
exchanged the countersign which runs clear round 
the Empire. 



A People at Home 

An up-country proverb says, "She was bidden to 
the wedding and set down to grind corn." The 
same fate, reversed, overtook me on my little ex- 
cursion. There is a crafty network of organizations 
of business men called Canadian Clubs. They catch 
people who look interesting, assemble their members 
during the mid-day lunch-hour, and, tying the victim 
to a steak, bid him discourse on anything that he 
thinks he knows. The idea might be copied else- 
where, since it takes men out of themselves to listen 
to matters not otherwise coming under their notice 
and, at the same time, does not hamper their work. 
It is safely short, too. The whole affair cannot ex- 
ceed an hour, of which the lunch fills half. The 
Clubs print their speeches annually, and one gets 
cross-sections of many interesting questions — from 
practical forestry to State mints — all set out by 
experts. 

Not being an expert, the experience, to me, was 
very like hard work. Till then I had thought speech- 
making was a sort of conversational whist, that any 
one could cut in it. I perceive now that it is an Art 
of conventions remote from anything that comes 

138 



A PEOPLE AT HOME 139 

out of an inkpot, and of colours hard to control. 
The Canadians seem to like listening to speeches, and, 
though this is by no means a national vice, they 
make good oratory on occasion. You know the 
old belief that the white man on brown, red, or black 
lands, will throw back in manner and instinct to the 
type originally bred there? Thus, a speech in the 
taal should carry the deep roll, the direct belly- 
appeal, the reiterated, cunning arguments, and 
the few simple metaphors of the prince of com- 
mercial orators, the Bantu. A New Zealander is 
said to speak from his diaphragm, hands clenched at 
the sides, as the old Maoris used. What we know of 
first-class Australian oratory shows us the same 
alertness, swift flight, and clean delivery as a thrown 
boomerang. I had half expected in Canadian 
speeches some survival of the Redskin's elaborate 
appeal to Suns, Moons, and Mountains — touches 
of grandiosity and ceremonial invocations. But 
nothing that I heard was referable to any primitive 
stock. There was a dignity, a restraint, and, above 
all, a weight in it, rather curious when one thinks of 
the influences to which the land lies open. Red it 
was not; French it was not; but a thing as much by 
itself as the speakers. 

So with the Canadian's few gestures and the bear- 
ing of his body. During the (Boer) war one watched 
the contingents from every point of view, and, most 
likely, drew wrong inferences. It struck me then 



i4o LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

that the Canadian, even when tired, slacked off less 
than the men from the hot countries, and while 
resting did not lie on his back or his belly, but rather 
on his side, a leg doubled under him, ready to rise in 
one surge. 

This time while I watched assemblies seated, men 
in hotels and passers-by, I fancied that he kept this 
habit of semi-tenseness at home among his own; that 
it was the complement of the man's still countenance, 
and the even, lowered voice. Looking at their foot- 
marks on the ground they seem to throw an almost 
straight track, neither splayed nor in-toed, and to 
set their feet down with a gentle forward pressure, 
rather like the Australian's stealthy footfall. Talk- 
ing among themselves, or waiting for friends, they 
did not drum with their fingers, fiddle with their feet, 
or feel the hair on their face. These things seem 
trivial enough, but when breeds are in the making 
everything is worth while. A man told me once 
— but I never tried the experiment — that each 
of our Four Races light and handle fire in their 
own way. 

Small wonder we differ! Here is a people with 
no people at their backs, driving the great world- 
plough which wins the world's bread up and up over 
the shoulder of the world — a spectacle, as it might 
be, out of some tremendous Norse legend. North 
of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold, with the flick 
and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that 



A PEOPLE AT HOME 141 

Odin and the iEsirs visited. These people also go 
north year by year, and drag audacious railways 
with them. Sometimes they burst into good wheat 
or timber-land, sometimes into mines of treasure, 
and all the North is full of voices — as South Africa 
was once — telling discoveries and making prophecies. 

When their winter comes, over the greater part of 
this country outside the cities, they must sit still, and 
eat and drink as the Msiv did. In summer they 
cram twelve months' work into six, because between 
such and such dates certain far rivers will shut, and, 
later, certain others, till, at last, even the Great 
Eastern Gate at Quebec locks, and men must go in 
and out by the side-doors at Halifax and St. John. 
These are conditions that make for extreme boldness, 
but not for extravagant boastings. 

The maples tell when it is time to finish, and all 
work in hand is regulated by their warning signal. 
Some jobs can be put through before winter; others 
must be laid aside ready to jump forward without a 
lost minute in spring. Thus, from Quebec to 
Calgary a note of drive — not hustle, but drive and 
finish-up — hummed like the steam-threshers on the 
still, autumn air. 

Hunters and sportsmen were coming in from the 
North; prospectors with them, their faces full of 
mystery, their pockets full of samples, like pros- 
pectors the world over. They had already been 
wearing wolf and coon skin coats. In the great 



i 4 2 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

cities which work the year round, carriage-shops 
exhibited one or two seductive nickel-plated sledges, 
as a hint; for the sleigh is "the chariot at hand here 
of Love/' In the country the farmhouses were 
stacking up their wood-piles within reach of the 
kitchen door, and taking down the fly-screens. 
(One leaves these on, as a rule, till the double win- 
dows are brought up from the cellar, and one has to 
hunt all over the house for missing screws.) Some- 
times one saw a few flashing lengths of new stovepipe 
in a backyard, and pitied the owner. There is no 
humour in the old, bitter-true stovepipe jests of the 
comic papers. 

But the railways — the wonderful railways — told 
the winter's tale most emphatically. The thirty-ton 
coal cars were moving over three thousand miles 
of track. They grunted and lurched against each 
other in the switch-yards, or thumped past statelily 
at midnight on their way to provident housekeepers 
of the prairie towns. It was not a clear way either; 
for the bacon, the lard, the apples, the butter, and 
the cheese, in beautiful white wood barrels, were 
rolling eastward towards the steamers before the 
wheat should descend on them. That is the fifth 
act of the great Year-Play for which the stage must 
be cleared. On scores of congested sidings lay huge 
girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes of rivets, 
once intended for the late Quebec Bridge — now so 
much mere obstruction — and the victuals had to 



A PEOPLE AT HOME 143 

pick their way through 'em; and behind the victuals 
was the lumber — clean wood out of the mountains — 
logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we 
pay such sinful prices in England — all seeking the 
sea. There was housing, food, and fuel for millions, 
on wheels together, and never a grain yet shifted of 
the real staple which men for five hundred miles 
were threshing out in heaps as high as fifty-pound 
villas. 

Add to this, that the railways were concerned for 
their own new developments — double-tracking, loops, 
cut-offs, taps, and feeder lines, and great swoops out 
into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. 
So the construction, ballast, and material trains, the 
grading machines, the wrecking cars with their 
camel-like sneering cranes — the whole plant of a 
new civilisation — had to find room somewhere in the 
general rally before Nature cried, "Lay off!" 

Does any one remember that joyful strong con- 
fidence after the war, when it seemed that, at last, 
South Africa was to be developed — when men laid 
out railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh 
rolling-stock, and labour, and believed gloriously in 
the future? It is true the hope was murdered 
afterward, but — multiply that good hour by a 
thousand, and you will have some idea of how it 
feels to be in Canada — a place which even an "Im- 
perial" Government cannot kill. I had the luck 
to be shown some things from the inside — to listen to 



i 4 4 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

the details of works projected; the record of works 
done. Above all, I saw what had actually been 
achieved in the fifteen years since I had last come 
that way. One advantage of a new land is that it 
makes you feel older than Time. I met cities 
where there had been nothing — literally, absolutely 
nothing, except, as the fairy tales say, "the birds 
crying, and the grass waving in the wind/' Villages 
and hamlets had grown to great towns, and the 
great towns themselves had trebled and quadrupled. 
And the railways rubbed their hands and cried, 
like the Afrites of old, "Shall we make a city where 
no city is; or render flourishing a city that is 
desolate ?" They do it too, while, across the water, 
gentlemen, never forced to suffer one day's physical 
discomfort in all their lives, pipe up and say, "How 
grossly materialistic!" 

I wonder sometimes whether any eminent novelist, 
philosopher, dramatist, or divine of to-day has to 
exercise half the pure imagination, not to mention 
insight, endurance, and self-restraint, which is ac- 
cepted without comment in what is called "the 
material exploitation" of a new country. Take only 
the question of creating a new city at the junction 
of two lines — all three in the air. The mere drama of 
it, the play of the human virtues, would fill a book. 
And when the work is finished, when the city is, 
when the new lines embrace a new belt of farms, and 
the tide of the Wheat has rolled North another un- 



A PEOPLE AT HOME 145 

expected degree, the men who did it break off, with- 
out compliments, to repeat the joke elsewhere. 

I had some talk with a youngish man whose 
business it was to train avalanches to jump clear of 
his section of the track. Thor went to Jotunheim 
only once or twice, and he had his useful hammer 
Miolnr with him. This Thor lived in Jotunheim 
among the green-ice-crowned peaks of the Selkirks — 
where if you disturb the giants at certain seasons 
of the year, by making noises, they will sit upon you 
and all your fine emotions. So Thor watches them 
glaring under the May sun, or dull and doubly 
dangerous beneath the spring rains. He wards off 
their strokes with enormous brattices of wood, wing- 
walls of logs bolted together, and such other contrap- 
tions as experience teaches. He bears the giants no 
malice; they do their work, he his. What bothers 
him a little is that the wind of their blows sometimes 
rips pines out of the opposite hillsides — explodes, as it 
were, a whole valley. He thinks, however, he can fix 
things so as to split large avalanches into little ones. 

Another man, to whom I did not talk, sticks in 
my memory. He had for years and years inspected 
trains at the head of a heavyish grade in the moun- 
tains — though not half so steep as the Hex 1 — where 
all brakes are jammed home, and the cars slither 
warily for ten miles. Tire-troubles there would be 
inconvenient, so he, as the best man, is given the 

1 Hex River, South Africa. 



146 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

heaviest job — monotony and responsibility com- 
bined. He did me the honour of wanting to speak to 
me, but first he inspected his train — on all fours with 
a hammer. By the time he was satisfied of the 
integrity of the underpinnings it was time for us to 
go; and all that I got was a friendly wave of the 
hand — a master craftsman's sign, you might call it. 

Canada seems full of this class of materialist. 

Which reminds me that the other day I saw the 
Lady herself in the shape of a tall woman of twenty- 
five or six, waiting for her tram on a street corner. 
She wore her almost flaxen-gold hair waved, and 
parted low on the forehead, beneath a black as- 
trachan toque, with red enamel maple-leaf hatpin in 
one side of it. This was the one touch of colour 
except the flicker of a buckle on the shoe. The 
dark, tailor-made dress had no trinkets or attach- 
ments, but fitted perfectly. She stood for perhaps 
a minute without any movement, both hands — 
right bare, left gloved — hanging naturally at her 
sides, the very fingers still, the weight of the superb 
body carried evenly on both feet, and the profile, 
which was that of Gudrun or Aslauga, thrown out 
against a dark stone column. What struck me most, 
next to the grave, tranquil eyes, was her slow, un- 
hurried breathing in the hurry about her. She was 
evidently a regular fare, for when her tram stopped 
she smiled at the lucky conductor; and the last I 
saw of her was a flash of the sun on the red maple- 



A PEOPLE AT HOME 147 

leaf, the full face lighted by that smile, and her 
hair very pale gold against the dead black fur. But 
the power of the mouth, the wisdom of the brow, the 
human comprehension of the eyes, and the out- 
striking vitality of the creature remained. That is 
how / would have my country drawn, were I a 
Canadian — and hung in Ottawa Parliament House, 
for the discouragement of prevaricators. 



Cities and Spaces 

What would you do with a magic carpet if one were 
lent you? I ask because for a month we had a 
private car of our very own — a trifling affair less 
than seventy foot long and thirty ton weight. 
"You may find her useful," said the donor casually, 
"to knock about the country. Hitch on to any 
train you choose and stop off where you choose." 

So she bore us over the C.P.R. from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific and back, and when we had no more 
need of her, vanished like the mango tree after the 
trick. 

A private car, though many books have been 
written in it, is hardly the best place from which to 
study a country, unless it happen that you have kept 
house and seen the seasons round under normal 
conditions on the same continent. Then you know 
how the cars look from the houses; which is not in 
the least as the houses look from the cars. Then, 
the very porter's brush in its nickel clip, the long 
cathedral-like aisle between the well-known green 
seats, the toll of the bell and the deep organ-like note 
of the engine wake up memories; and every sight, 
smell, and sound outside are like old friends re- 

148 



CITIES AND SPACES 149 

membering old days together. A piano-top buggy 
on a muddy, board-sidewalked street, all cut up by 
the narrow tires; the shingling at the corner of a 
verandah on a new-built house; a broken snake-fence 
girdling an old pasture of mulleins and skull-headed 
boulders; a wisp of Virginia creeper dying splendidly 
on the edge of a patch of corn; half a dozen panels of 
snow-fence above a cutting, or even a shameless 
patent-medicine advertisement, yellow on the black 
of a tobacco-barn, can make the heart thump and 
the eyes fill if the beholder have only touched the 
life of which they are part. What must they mean 
to the native-born? There was a prairie-bred girl 
on the train, coming back after a year on the Con- 
tinent, for whom the pine-belted hills with real 
mountains behind, the solemn loops of the river, and 
the intimate friendly farm had nothing to tell. 

'You can do these landscapes better in Italy," 
she explained, and, with the indescribable gesture of 
plain folk stifled in broken ground, "I want to push 
these hills away and get into the open again! Fm 
Winnipeg." 

She would have understood the Hanover Road 
schoolmistress, back from a visit to Cape Town, 
whom I once saw drive off into thirty miles of mirage 
almost shouting, " Thank God, here's something 
like home at last." 

Other people ricochetted from side to side of the 
car, reviving this, rediscovering that, anticipating 



i 5 o LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

t'other thing, which, sure enough, slid round the 
next curve to meet them, caring nothing if all the 
world knew they were home again; and the newly 
arrived Englishman with his large wooden packing- 
cases marked "Settlers' Effects" had no more part 
in the show than a new boy his first day at school. 
But two years in Canada and one run home will 
make him free of the Brotherhood in Canada as it 
does anywhere else. He may grumble at certain 
aspects of the life, lament certain richnesses only to 
be found in England, but as surely as he grumbles 
so surely he returns to the big skies, and the big 
chances. The failures are those who complain 
that the land "does not know a gentleman when it 
sees him." They are quite right. The land sus- 
pends all judgment on all men till it has seen them 
work. Thereafter as may be, but work they must 
because there is a very great deal to be done. 

Unluckily the railroads which made the country 
are bringing in persons who are particular as to the 
nature and amenities of their work, and if so be they 
do not find precisely what they are looking for, they 
complain in print which makes all men seem equal. 

The special joy of our trip lay in having travelled 
the line when it was new and, like the Canada of 
those days, not much believed in, when all the high 
and important officials, whose little fingers unhooked 
cars, were also small and disregarded. To-day, things, 
men, and cities were different, and the story of the 



CITIES AND SPACES 151 

line mixed itself up with the story of the country, the 
while the car-wheels clicked out, "John Kino — ■ 
John Kino! Nagasaki, Yokohama, Hakodate, 
Heh!" for we were following in the wake of the 
Imperial Limited, all full of Hongkong and Treaty 
Ports men. There were old, known, and wonderfully 
grown cities to be looked at before we could get 
away to the new work out west, and, "What d'you 
think of this building and that suburb?" they said, 
imperiously. "Come out and see what has been 
done in this generation." 

The impact of a Continent is rather overwhelming 
till you remind yourself that it is no more than your 
own joy and love and pride in your own patch of 
garden written a little large over a few more acres. 
Again, as always, it was the dignity of the cities that 
impressed — an austere Northern dignity of outline, 
grouping, and perspective, aloof from the rush of 
traffic in the streets. Montreal, of the black- 
frocked priests and the French notices, had it; and 
Ottawa, of the gray stone palaces and the St. Peters- 
burg-like shining water-frontages; and Toronto, 
consumingly commercial, carried the same power 
in the same repose. Men are always building better 
than they know, and perhaps this steadfast archi- 
tecture is waiting for the race when their first flurry 
of newly realized expansion shall have spent itself, 
and the present hurrah's-nest of telephone-poles in 
the streets, shall have been abolished. There are 



1 52 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

strong objections to any non-fusible, bi-lingual 
community within a nation, but however much the 
French are made to hang back in the work of develop- 
ment, their withdrawn and unconcerned cathedrals, 
schools, and convents, and one aspect of the spirit 
that breathes from them, make for good. Says 
young Canada: "There are millions of dollars 
worth of church property in the cities which aren't 
allowed to be taxed. " On the other hand, the 
Catholic schools and universities, though they are 
reported to keep up the old medieval mistrust of 
Greek, teach the classics as lovingly, tenderly, and 
intimately as the old Church has always taught 
them. After all, it must be worth something to say 
your prayers in a dialect of the tongue that Virgil 
handled; and a certain touch of insolence, more 
magnificent and more ancient than the insolence of 
present materialism, makes a good blend in a new 
land. 

I had the good fortune to see the cities through 
the eyes of an Englishman out for the first time. 
"Have you been to the Bank?" he cried. "I've 
never seen anything like it!" "What's the matter 
with the Bank?" I asked: for the financial situation 
across the Border was at th^t moment more than 
usual picturesque. "It's wonderful!" said he; 
"marble pillars — acres of mosaic — steel grilles — 
might be a cathedral. No one ever told me." "I 
shouldn't worry over a Bank that pays its de- 



CITIES AND SPACES 153 

positors," I replied soothingly. "There are several 
like it in Ottawa and Toronto." Next he ran across 
some pictures in some palaces, and was downright 
angry because no one had told him that there were 
five priceless private galleries in one city. "Look 
here!" he explained. "I've been seeing Corots, and 
Greuzes and Gainsboroughs, and a Holbein, and 
— and hundreds of really splendid pictures ! " "Why 
shouldn't you?" I said. "They've given up painting 
their lodges with vermilion hereabouts." "Yes, but 
what I mean is, have you — seen the equipment of 
their schools and colleges, desks, libraries, and lava- 
tories? It's miles ahead of anything we have and 
— no one ever told me." "What was the good of tell- 
ing? You wouldn't have believed. There's a build- 
ing in one of the cities, on the lines of the Sheldonian, 
but better, and if you go as far as Winnipeg, you'll 
see the finest hotel in all the world." 

"Nonsense!" he said. "You're pulling my leg! 
Winnipeg's a prairie-town." 

I left him still lamenting — about a Club and a 
Gymnasium this time — that no one had ever told 
him about; and still doubting all that he had heard 
of Wonders to come. 

If we could only manacle four hundred Members 
of Parliament, like the Chinese in the election 
cartoons, and walk them round the Empire, what an 
all-comprehending little Empire we should be when 
the survivors got home! 



iS4 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

Certainly the cities have good right to be proud, 
and I waited for them to boast; but they were so 
busy explaining they were only at the beginning of 
things that, for the honour of the Family, I had to do 
the boasting. In this praiseworthy game I credited 
Melbourne (rightly, I hope, but the pace was too 
good to inquire) with acres of municipal buildings and 
leagues of art galleries; enlarged the borders of 
Sydney harbour to meet a statement about Toronto's 
wharfage; and recommended folk to see Cape Town 
Cathedral when it should be finished. But Truth 
will out even on a visit. Our Eldest Sister has more 
of beauty and strength inside her three cities alone 
than the rest of Us put together. Yet it would do 
her no harm to send a commission through the ten 
great cities of the Empire to see what is being done 
there in the way of street cleaning, water-supply, 
and traffic-regulation. 

Here and there the people are infected with the 
unworthy superstition of "hustle," which means 
half-doing your appointed job and applauding your 
own slapdasherie for as long a time as would enable 
you to finish off two clean pieces of work. Little 
congestions of traffic, that an English rural police- 
man, in a country town, disentangles automatically, 
are allowed to develop into ten-minute blocks, 
where waggons and men bang, and back, and blas- 
pheme, for no purpose except to waste time. 

The assembly and dispersal of crowds, purchase of 



CITIES AND SPACES 155 

tickets, and a good deal of the small machinery of 
life is clogged and hampered by this unstable, 
southern spirit which is own brother to Panic. 
"Hustle" does not sit well on the national character 
any more than falsetto or fidgeting becomes grown 
men. "Drive," a laudable and necessary quality, is 
quite different, and one meets it up the Western 
Road where the new country is being made. 

We got clean away from the Three Cities and 
the close-tilled farming and orchard districts, into 
the Land of Little Lakes— a country of rushing 
streams, clear-eyed ponds, and boulders among 
berrybushes; all crying "Trout" and "Bear." 

Not so very long ago only a few wise people kept 
holiday in that part of the world, and they did not 
give away their discoveries. Now it has become a 
summer playground where people hunt and camp 
at large. The names of its further rivers are known 
in England, and men, otherwise sane, slip away from 
London into the birches, and come out again bearded 
and smoke-stained, when the ice is thick enough to 
cut a canoe. Sometimes they go to look for game; 
sometimes for minerals — perhaps, even, oil. No one 
can prophesy. "We are only at the beginning of 
things." 

Said an Afrite of the Railway as we passed in our 
magic carpet: "YouVe no notion of the size of our 
tourist-traffic. It has all grown up since the early 
'nineties. The trolley car teaches people in the 



156 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

towns to go for little picnics. When they get more 
money they go for long ones. All this continent will 
want playgrounds soon. We're getting them ready/' 

The girl from Winnipeg saw the morning frost lie 
white on the long grass at the lake edges, and 
watched the haze of mellow golden birch leaves as 
they dropped. "Now that's the way trees ought to 
turn," she said. "Don't you think our Eastern 
maple is a little violent in colour?" Then we 
passed through a country where for many hours the 
talk in the cars was of mines and the treatment of 
ores. Men told one tales — prospectors' yarns of the 
sort one used to hear vaguely before Klondike or 
Nome were public property. They did not care 
whether one believed or doubted. They, too, were 
only at the beginning of things — silver perhaps, gold 
perhaps, nickel perhaps. If a great city did not 
arise at such a place — the very name was new since 
my day — it would assuredly be born within a few 
miles of it. The silent men boarded the cars, and 
dropped off, and disappeared beyond thickets and 
hills precisely as the first widely spaced line of 
skirmishers fans out and vanishes along the front of 
the day's battle. 

One old man sat before me like avenging Time 
itself, and talked of prophecies of evil that had been 
falsified. " They said there wasn't nothing here 
excep' rocks an' snow. They said there never 
wouldn't be nothing here excep' the railroad. 



CITIES AND SPACES 157 

There's them that can't see yit 9 " and he gimleted me 
with a fierce eye. "An' all the while, fortunes is 
made — piles is made — right under our noses." 

"Have you made your pile?" I asked. 

He smiled as the artist smiles — all true prospectors 
have that lofty smile — "Me? No. I've been a 
prospector most o' my time, but I haven't lost any- 
thing. I've had my fun out of the game. By God, 
I've had my fun out of it ! " 

I told him how I had once come through when 
land and timber grants could have been picked up 
for half less than nothing. 

"Yes," he said placidly. "I reckon if you'd had 
any kind of an education you could ha' made a 
quarter of a million dollars easy in those days. 
And it's to be made now if you could see where. 
How? Can you tell me what the capital of the 
Hudson Bay district's goin' to be? You can't. 
Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is 
going to arise. I get off* here, but if I have my health 
I'll be out next summer again — prospectin' North." 

Imagine a country where men prospect till they 
are seventy, with no fear of fever, fly, horse-sickness, 
or trouble from the natives — a country where food 
and water always taste good! He told me curious 
things about some fabled gold — the Eternal Mother- 
lode — out in the North, which is to humble the pride 
of Nome. And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had 
never heard the name of Johannesburg! 



1 58 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

As the train swung round the shores of Lake 
Superior the talk swung over to Wheat. Oh yes, 
men said, there were mines in the country — they 
were only at the beginning of mines — but that 
part of the world existed to clean and grade and 
handle and deliver the Wheat by rail and steamer. 
The track was being duplicated by a few hundred 
miles to keep abreast of the floods of it. By and by 
it might be a four-track road. They were only at 
the beginning. Meantime here was the Wheat 
sprouting, tender green, a foot high, among a hun- 
dred sidings where it had spilled from the cars; there 
were the high-shouldered, tea-caddy grain-elevators 
to clean, and the hospitals to doctor the Wheat; here 
was new, gaily painted machinery going forward to 
reap and bind and thresh the Wheat, and all those 
car-loads of workmen had been slapping down more 
sidings against the year's delivery of the Wheat. 

Two towns stand on the shores of the lake less 
than a mile apart. What Lloyds is to shipping, or 
the College of Surgeons to medicine, that they are to 
the Wheat. Its honour and integrity are in their 
hands; and they hate each other with the pure, 
poisonous, passionate hatred which makes towns 
grow. If Providence wiped out one of them, the 
survivor would pine away and die — a mateless hate- 
bird. Some day they must unite, and the question 
of the composite name they shall then carry already 
vexes them. A man there told me that Lake 



CITIES AND SPACES 159 

Superior was "a useful piece of water/ 5 in that it lay 
so handy to the C.P.R. tracks. There is a quiet 
horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one 
revisits them. Fresh water has no right or call to dip 
over the horizon, pulling down and pushing up the 
hulls of big steamers; no right to tread the slow, 
deep-sea dance-step between wrinkled cliffs; nor to 
roar in on weed and sand beaches between vast 
headlands that run out for leagues into haze and sea 
fog. Lake Superior is all the same stuff as what 
towns pay taxes for, but it engulfs and wrecks 
and drives ashore, like a fully accredited ocean — a 
hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent. 
Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it has 
produced a breed of sailors who bear the same 
relation to the salt-water variety as a snake-charmer 
does to a lion-tamer. 
Yet it is undoubtedly a useful piece of water. 



Newspapers and Democracy 

Let it be granted that, as the loud-voiced herald 
hired by the Eolithic tribe to cry the news of the 
coming day along the caves, preceded the chosen 
Tribal Bard who sang the more picturesque history 
of the tribe, so is Journalism senior to Literature, in 
that Journalism meets the first tribal need after 
warmth, food, and women. 

In new countries it shows clear trace of its descent 
from the Tribal Herald. A tribe thinly occupying 
large spaces feels lonely. It desires to hear the roll- 
call of its members cried often and loudly; to comfort 
itself with the knowledge that there are companions 
just below the horizon. It employs, therefore, 
heralds to name and describe all who pass. That is 
why newspapers of new countries seem often so 
outrageously personal. The tribe,* moreover, needs 
quick and sure knowledge of everything that touches 
on its daily life in the big spaces — earth, air, and 
water news which the Older Peoples have put behind 
them. That is why its newspapers so often seem 
so laboriously trivial. 

For example, a red-nosed member of the tribe, 
Pete O'Halloran, comes in thirty miles to have his 

160 



NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY 161 

horse shod, and incidentally smashes the king-bolt 
of his buckboard at a bad place in the road. The 
Tribal Herald — a thin weekly, with a patent inside — 
connects the red nose and the breakdown with an 
innuendo which, to the outsider, is clumsy libel. 
But the Tribal Herald understands that two-and- 
seventy families of the tribe may use that road 
weekly. It concerns them to discover whether the 
accident was due to Pete being drunk or, as Pete 
protests, to the neglected state of the road. Fifteen 
men happen to know that Pete's nose is an affliction, 
not an indication. One of them loafs across and 
explains to the Tribal Herald, who next week cries 
aloud that the road ought to be mended. Mean- 
time Pete, warm to the marrow at having focussed 
the attention of his tribe for a few moments, retires 
thirty miles up-stage, pursued by advertisements 
of buckboards guaranteed not to break their king- 
bolts, and later (which is what the tribe were after 
all the time) some tribal authority or other mends 
the roads. 

This is only a big-scale diagram, but with a little 
attention you can see the tribal instinct of self- 
preservation quite logically underrunning all sorts 
of queer modern developments. 

As the tribe grows, and men do not behold the 
horizon from edge to unbroken edge, their desire to 
know all about the next man weakens a little — but 
not much. Outside the cities are still the long dis- 



i6z LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

tances, the "vast, unoccupied areas" of the adver- 
tisements; and the men who come and go yearn to 
keep touch with and report themselves as of old to 
their lodges. A man stepping out of the dark into 
the circle of the fires naturally, if he be a true man, 
holds up his hands and says, "I, So-and-So, am here." 
You can watch the ritual in full swing at any hotel 
when the reporter (pro Tribal Herald) runs his eyes 
down the list of arrivals, and before he can turn from 
the register is met by the newcomer, who, without 
special desire for notoriety, explains his business and 
intentions. Observe, it is always at evening that 
the reporter concerns himself with strangers. By 
day he follows the activities of his own city and the 
doings of near-by chiefs; but when it is time to close 
the stockade, to lager the waggons, to draw the thorn- 
bush back into the gap, then in all lands he reverts to 
the Tribal Herald, who is also the tribal Outer Guard. 

There are countries where a man is indecently 
pawed over by chattering heralds who bob their 
foul torches in his face till he is singed and smoked 
at once. In Canada the necessary "Stand and de- 
liver your sentiments" goes through with the large 
decency that stamps all the Dominion. A stranger's 
words are passed on to the tribe quite accurately; 
no dirt is put into his mouth, and where the heralds 
judge that it would be better not to translate certain 
remarks they courteously explain why. 

It was always delightful to meet the reporters, for 



NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY 163 

they were men interested in their land, with the 
keen, unselfish interest that one finds in young house- 
surgeons or civilians. Thanks to the (Boer) war, many 
of them had reached out to the ends of our earth, and 
spoke of the sister nations as it did one good to hear. 
Consequently the interviews — which are as dreary 
for the reporter as the reported — often turned into 
pleasant and unpublished talks. One felt at every 
turn of the quick sentences to be dealing with made 
and trained players of the game — balanced men who 
believed in decencies not to be disregarded, confi- 
dences not to be violated, and honour not to be 
mocked. (This may explain what men and women 
have told me — that there is very little of the brutal 
domestic terrorism of the Press in Canada, and not 
much blackmailing.) They neither spat nor wrig- 
gled; they interpolated no juicy anecdotes of murder 
or theft among their acquaintance; and not once be- 
tween either ocean did they or any other fellow- 
subjects volunteer that their country was "law- 
abiding." 

You know the First Sign-post on the Great Main 
Road? "When a Woman advertises that she is 
virtuous, a Man that he is a gentleman, a Community 
that it is loyal, or a Country that it is law-abiding — 
go the other way!" 

Yet, while the men's talk was so good and new, 
their written word seemed to be cast in conventional, 
not to say old-fashioned, moulds. A quarter of a 



i6 4 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

century ago a sub-editor, opening his mail, could 
identify the Melbourne Argus, the Sydney Morning 
Herald, or the Cape Times as far as he could see them. 
Even unheaded clippings from them declared their 
origin as a piece of hide betrays the beast that wore 
it. But he noticed then that Canadian journals left 
neither spoor nor scent — might have blown in from 
anywhere between thirty degrees of latitude — and 
had to be carefully identified by hand. To-day the 
spacing, the headlines, the advertising of Canadian 
papers, the chessboard-like look of the open page 
which should be a daily beautiful study in black and 
white, the brittle pulp-paper, the machine-set type, 
are all as standardized as the railway cars of the 
Continent. Indeed, looking through a mass of 
Canadian journals is like trying to find one's own 
sleeper in a corridor train. Newspaper offices are 
among the most conservative organizations in the 
world; but surely after twenty-five years some 
changes might be permitted to creep in; some origi- 
nal convention of expression or assembly might be 
developed. 

I drew up to this idea cautiously among a knot of 
fellow-craftsmen. 'You mean/' said one straight- 
eyed youth, "that we are a back-number copying 
back-numbers ?" 

It was precisely what I did mean, so I made haste 
to deny it. ''We know that," he said cheerfully. 
"Remember we haven't the sea all round us — and 



NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY 165 

the postal rates to England have only just been low- 
ered. It will all come right." 

Surely it will; but meantime one hates to think of 
these splendid people using second-class words to 
express first-class emotions. 

And so naturally from Journalism to Democracy. 
Every country is entitled to her reservations, and 
pretences, but the more "democratic" a land is the 
more make-believes must the stranger respect. 
Some of the Tribal Heralds were very good to me 
in this matter, and, as it were, nudged me when 
it was time to duck in the House of Rimmon. Dur- 
ing their office hours they professed an unflinching 
belief in the blessed word "Democracy," which 
means any crowd on the move — that is to say, the 
helpless th:r_g which breaks through floors and 
falls into cellars; overturns pleasure-boats by rushing 
from port to starboard; stamps men into pulp be- 
cause it thinks it has lost sixpence, and jams and 
grills in the doorways of blazing theatres. Out 
of office, like every one else, they relaxed. Many 
winked, a few were flippant, but they all agreed 
that the only drawback to Democracy was Demos 
—a jealous God of primitive tastes and despotic ten- 
dencies. I received a faithful portrait of him from a 
politician who had worshipped him all his life. It 
was practically the Epistle of Jeremy — the sixth 
chapter of Baruch — done into unquotable English. 

But Canada is not yet an ideal Democracy. For 



166 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

one thing she has had to work hard among rough- 
edged surroundings which carry inevitable conse- 
quences. For another, the law in Canada exists and 
is administered, not as a surprise, a joke, a favour, 
a bribe, or a Wrestling Turk exhibition, but as an 
integral part of the national character — no more to be 
forgotten or talked about than one's trousers. If you 
kill, you hang. If you steal, you go to jail. This 
has worked toward peace, self-respect, and, I think, 
the innate dignity of the people. On the other hand 
— which is where the trouble will begin — railways 
and steamers make it possible nowadays to bring in 
persons who need never lose touch of hot and cold 
water-taps, spread tables, and crockery till they are 
turned out, much surprised, into the wilderness. 
They clean miss the long weeks of salt-water and 
the slow passage across the plains which pickled and 
tanned the early emigrants. They arrive with soft 
bodies and unaired souls. I had this vividly brought 
home to me by a man on a train among the Selkirks. 
He stood on the safely railed rear-platform, looked at 
the gigantic pine-furred shoulder round which men at 
their lives' risk had led every yard of the track, and 
chirruped : " I say, why can't all this be nationalised ? " 
There was nothing under heaven except the snows 
and the steep to prevent him from dropping off the 
cars and hunting a mine for himself. Instead of which 
he went into the dining-car. That is one type. 
A man told me the old tale of a crowd of Russian 



NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY 167 

immigrants who at a big fire in a city Verted to the 
ancestral type, and blocked the streets yelling, 
"Down with the Czar!" That is another type. 
A few days later I was shown a wire stating that a 
community of Doukhobors— Russians again — had, 
not for the first time, undressed themselves, and 
were fleeing up the track to meet the Messiah before 
the snow fell. Police were pursuing them with 
warm underclothing, and trains would please take 
care not to run over them. 

So there you have three sort of steam-borne un- 
fitness — soft, savage, and mad. There is a fourth 
brand, which may be either home-grown or imported, 
but democracies do not recognize it, of downright 
bad folk — grown, healthy men and women who 
honestly rejoice in doing evil. These four classes 
acting together might conceivably produce a rather 
pernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, 
and the like reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and 
arrogance. For example, I read a letter in a paper 
sympathising with these same Doukhobors. The 
writer knew a community of excellent people in 
England (you see where the rot starts!) who lived 
barefoot, paid no taxes, ate nuts, and were above 
marriage. They were a soulful folk, living pure 
lives. The Doukhobors were also pure and soulful, 
entitled in a free country to live their own lives, 
and not to be oppressed, etc., etc. (Imported soft, 
observe, playing up to Imported mad.) Meantime, 



168 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

disgusted police were chasing the Doukhobors into 
flannels that they might live to produce children fit 
to consort with the sons of the man who wrote that 
letter and the daughters of the crowd that lost their 
heads at the fire. 

"All of which/' men and women answered, "we 
admit. But what can we do? We want people/' 
And they showed vast and well-equipped schools, 
where the children of Slav immigrants are taught 
English and the songs of Canada. "When they 
grow up/' people said, "you can't tell them from 
Canadians/' It was a wonderful work. The 
teacher holds up pens, reels, and so forth, giving the 
name in English; the children repeating Chinese 
fashion. Presently when they have enough words 
they can bridge back to the knowledge they learned 
in their own country, so that a boy of twelve, at, 
say, the end of a year, will produce a well-written 
English account of his journey from Russia, how 
much his mother paid for food by the way, and 
where his father got his first job. He will also lay 
his hand on his heart, and say, "I — am — a — Can- 
adian." This gratifies the Canadian, who naturally 
purrs over an emigrant owing everything to the 
land which adopted him and set him on his feet. 
The Lady Bountiful of an English village takes the 
same interest in a child she has helped on in the 
world. And the child repays by his gratitude and 
good behaviour. 



NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY 169 

Personally, one cannot care much for those who 
have renounced their own country. They may have 
had good reason, but they have broken the rules of 
the game, and ought to be penalised instead of 
adding to their score. Nor is it true, as men pre- 
tend, that a few full meals and fine clothes obliterate 
all taint of alien instinct and reversion. A thousand 
years cannot be as yesterday for mankind; and one 
has only to glance at the races across the Border to 
realise how in outlook, manner, expression, and 
morale the South and South-east profoundly and 
fatally affects the North and North-west. That was 
why the sight of the beady-eyed, muddy-skinned, 
aproned women, with handkerchiefs on their heads 
and Oriental bundles in their hands, always distressed 
one. 

"But why must you get this stuff?' 5 I asked. 
"You know it is not your equal, and it knows that 
it is not your equal; and that is bad for you 
both. What is the matter with the English as im- 
migrants?" 

The answers were explicit, "Because the English 
do not work. Because we are sick of Remittance- 
men and loafers sent out here. Because the English 
are rotten with Socialism. Because the English 
don't fit with our life. They kick at our way of 
doing things. They are always telling us how 
things are done in England. They carry frills! 
Don't you know the story of the Englishman who 



i7o LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

lost his way and was found half-dead of thirst beside 
a river? When he was asked why he didn't drink, he 
said, "How the deuce can I without a glars?" 

"But," I argued over three thousand miles of 
country, "all these are excellent reasons for bringing 
in the Englishman. It is true that in his own coun- 
try he is taught to shirk work, because kind, silly 
people fall over each other to help and debauch and 
amuse him. Here, General January will stiffen him 
up. Remittance-men are an affliction to every 
branch of the Family, but your manners and morals 
can't be so tender as to suffer from a few thousand of 
them among your six millions. As to the English- 
man's Socialism, he is, by nature, the most un- 
social animal alive. What you call Socialism is his 
intellectual equivalent for Diabolo and Limerick 
competitions. As to his criticisms, you surely 
wouldn't marry a woman who agreed with you in 
everything, and you ought to choose your immi- 
grants on the same lines. You admit that the 
Canadian is too busy to kick at anything. The 
Englishman is a born kicker. ("Yes, he is all that," 
they said.) He kicks on principle, and that is what 
makes for civilisation. So did your Englishman's 
instinct about the glass. Every new country 
needs — vitally needs — one-half of one per cent of its 
population trained to die of thirst rather than 
drink out of their hands. You are always talking 
of the second generation of your Smyrniotes and 



NEWSPAPERS AND DEMOCRACY 171 

Bessarabians. Think what the second generation 
of the English are!" 

They thought- — quite visibly — but they did not 
much seem to relish it. There was a queer stringhalt 
in their talk — a conversational shy across the road — 
when one touched on these subjects. After a while 
I went to a Tribal Herald whom I could trust, and 
demanded of him point-blank where the trouble 
really lay, and who was behind it. 

"It is Labour/' he said. "You had better leave 
it alone." 



Labour 

One cannot leave a thing alone if it is thrust under 
the nose at every turn. I had not quitted the Quebec 
steamer three minutes when I was asked point- 
blank: "What do you think of the question of 
Asiatic Exclusion which is Agitating our Com- 
munity ?" 

The Second Sign-Post on the Great Main Road 
says: "If a Community is agitated by a Question — 
inquire politely after the health of the Agitator. 55 
This I did, without success; and had to temporise all 
across the Continent till I could find some one to 
help me to acceptable answers. The Question 
appears to be confined to British Columbia. There, 
after a while, the men who had their own reasons for 
not wishing to talk referred me to others who ex- 
plained, and on the acutest understanding that no 
names were to be published (it is sweet to see engineers 
afraid of being hoist by their own petards) one got 
more or less at something like facts. 

The Chinaman has always been in the habit of 
coming to British Columbia, where he makes, as he 
does elsewhere, the finest servant in the world. No 
one, I was assured on all hands, objects to the 

172 



LABOUR 173 

biddable Chinaman. He takes work which no 
white man in a new country will handle, and when 
kicked by the mean white will not grossly retaliate. 
He has always paid for the privilege of making his 
fortune on this wonderful coast, but with singular 
forethought and statesmanship, the popular Will, 
some few years ago, decided to double the head-tax 
on his entry. Strange as it may appear, the China- 
man now charges double for his services, and is 
scarce at that. This is said to be one of the reasons 
why overworked white women die or go off their 
heads; and why in new cities you can see blocks of 
flats being built to minimize the inconveniences of 
housekeeping without help. The birth-rate will 
fall later in exact proportion to those flats. 

Since the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese have 
taken to coming over to British Columbia. They 
also do work which no white man will; such as 
hauling wet logs for lumber mills out of cold water 
at from eight to ten shillings a day. They supply 
the service in hotels and dining-rooms and keep 
small shops. The trouble with them is that they 
are just a little too good, and when attacked defend 
themselves with asperity. 

A fair sprinkling of Punjabis — ex-soldiers, Sikhs, 
Muzbis, and Jats — are coming in on the boats. The 
plague at home seems to have made them restless, 
but I could not gather why so many of them come 
from Shahpur, Phillour, and Jullundur way. These 



174 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

men do not, of course, offer for house-service, but 
work in the lumber mills, and with the least little 
care and attention could be made most valuable. 
Some one ought to tell them not to bring their old 
men with them, and better arrangements should be 
made for their remitting money home to their 
villages. They are not understood, of course; but 
they are not hated. 

The objection is all against the Japanese. So 
far — except that they are said to have captured the 
local fishing trade at Vancouver, precisely as the 
Malays control the Cape Town fish business — 
they have not yet competed with the whites; but 
I was earnestly assured by many men that there was 
danger of their lowering the standard of life and 
wages. The demand, therefore, in certain quarters 
is that they go — absolutely and unconditionally. 
(You may have noticed that Democracies are strong 
on the imperative mood.) An attempt was made to 
shift them shortly before I came to Vancouver, but it 
was not very successful, because the Japanese 
barricaded their quarters and flocked out, a broken 
bottle held by the neck in either hand, which they 
jabbed in the faces of the demonstrators. It is, per- 
haps, easier to haze and hammer bewildered Hindus 
and Tamils, as is being done across the Border, 
than to stampede the men of the Yalu and Liaoyang. 1 

But when one began to ask questions one got lost 

x Battles in the Russo-Japanese War. * 



LABOUR 175 

in a maze of hints, reservations, and orations, mostly 
delivered with constraint, as though the talkers 
were saying a piece learned by heart. Here are 
some samples: — 

A man penned me in a corner with a single heavily 
capitalised sentence. "There is a General Senti- 
ment among Our People that the Japanese Must 
Go," said he. 

"Very good," said L "How d'you propose to 
set about it?" 

"That is nothing to us. There is a General 
Sentiment," etc. 

"Quite so. Sentiment is a beautiful thing, but 
what are you going to do?" He did not condescend 
to particulars, but kept repeating the sentiment, 
which, as I promised, I record. 

Another man was a little more explicit. "We 
desire," he said, "to keep the Chinaman. But the 
Japanese must go." 

"Then who takes their place? Isn't this rather a 
new country to pitch people out of?" 

'We must develop our Resources slowly, sir — 
with an Eye to the Interests of our Children. We 
must preserve the Continent for Races which will 
assimilate with Ours. We must not be swamped by 
Aliens." 

"Then bring in your own races and bring 'em in 
quick," I ventured. 

This is the one remark one must not make in 



176 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

certain quarters of the West; and I lost caste heavily 
while he explained (exactly as the Dutch did at the 
Cape years ago) how British Columbia was by 
no means so rich as she appeared; that she was 
throttled by capitalists and monopolists of all kinds; 
that white labour had to be laid off and fed and 
warmed during the winter; that living expenses 
were enormously high; that they were at the end 
of a period of prosperity, and were now enter- 
ing on lean years; and that whatever steps were 
necessary for bringing in more white people should 
be taken with extreme caution. Then he added 
that the railway rates to British Columbia were so 
high that emigrants were debarred from coming on 
there. 

"But haven't the rates been reduced?" I 
asked. 

"Yes — yes, I believe they have, but immigrants 
are so much in demand that they are snapped up 
before they have got so far West. You must re- 
member, too, that skilled labour is not like agricul- 
tural labour. It is dependent on so many con- 
siderations. And the Japanese must go." 

"So people have told me. But I heard stories of 
dairies and fruit-farms in British Columbia being 
thrown up because there was no labour to milk or 
pick the fruit. Is that true, d'you think?" 

'Well, you can't expect a man with all the chances 
that our country offers him to milk cows in a pasture. 



LABOUR 177 

A Chinaman can do that. We want races that will 
assimilate with ours," etc., etc. 

"But didn't the Salvation Army offer to bring in 
three or four thousand English some short time ago ? 
What came of that idea?" 

"It— er— fell through." 

"Why?" 

" For political reasons, I believe. We do not want 
People who will lower the Standard of Living. 
That is why the Japanese must go." 

"Then why keep the Chinese?" 

''We can get on with the Chinese. We can't get 
on without the Chinese. But we must have Emigra- 
tion of a Type that will assimilate with Our People. 
I hope I have made myself clear ? " 

I hoped that he had, too. 

Now hear a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper. 
"We have to pay for this precious state of things 
with our health and our children's. Do you know 
the saying that the Frontier is hard on women and 
cattle? This isn't the frontier, but in some respects 
it's worse, because we have all the luxuries and 
appearances — the pretty glass and silver to put on 
the table. We have to dust, polish, and arrange 'em 
after we've done our housework. I don't suppose 
that means anything to you, but — try it for a 
month! We have no help. A Chinaman costs 
fifty or sixty dollars a month now. Our husbands 
can't always afford that. How old would you take 



178 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

me for? I'm not thirty. Well thank God, I stopped 
my sister coming out West. Oh yes, it's a fine 
country — for men." 

"Can't you import servants from England?" 
"I can't pay a girl's passage in order to have her 
married in three months. Besides, she wouldn't 
work. They won't when they see Chinamen work- 
ing." 

"Do you object to the Japanese, too?" 
"Of course not. No one does. It's only politics. 
The wives of the men who earn six and seven dollars 
a day — skilled labour they call it — have Chinese and 
Jap servants. We can't afford it. We have to 
think of saving for the future, but those other people 
live up to every cent they earn. They know they're 
all right. They're Labour. They'll be looked 
after, whatever happens. You can see how the 
State looks after me." 

A little later I had occasion to go through a great 
and beautiful city between six and seven of a crisp 
morning. Milk and fish, vegetables, etc., were 
being delivered to the silent houses by Chinese and 
Japanese. Not a single man was visible on that 
chilly job. 

Later still a man came to see me, without too 
publicly giving his name. He was in a small way of 
business, and told me (others had said much the 
same thing) that if I gave him away his business 
would suffer. He talked for half an hour on end. 



LABOUR 179 

"Am I to understand, then/' I said, "that what 
you call Labour absolutely dominates this part of 
the world?" 

He nodded. 

"That it is difficult to get skilled labour into here?" 

"Difficult? My God, if I want to get an extra 
hand for my business — I pay Union wages, of 
course — I have to arrange to get him here secretly. 
I have to go out and meet him, accidental-like, down 
the line, and if the Unions find out that he is coming, 
they, like as not, order him back East, or turn him 
down across the Border." 

" Even if he has his Union ticket ? Why ? " 

"They'll tell him that labour conditions are not 
good here. He knows what that means. He'll 
turn back quick enough. I'm in a small way of 
business, and I can't afford to take any chances 
fighting the Unions." 

"What would happen if you did?" 

"D'you know what's happening across the Border? 
Men get blown up there— with dynamite." 

"But this isn't across the Border?" 

"It's a damn-sight too near to be pleasant. And 
witnesses get blown up, too. You see, the Labour 
situation ain't run from our side the line. It's 
worked from down under. You may have noticed 
men were rather careful when they talked about it?" 

"Yes, I noticed all that." 

"Well, it ain't a pleasant state of affairs. I don't 



i8o LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

say that the Unions here would do anything to you — 
and please understand Fm all for the rights of 
Labour myself. Labour has no better friend than 
me — I've been a working man, though I've got a 
business of my own now. Don't run away with any 
idea that I'm against Labour — will you?" 

"Not in the least. I can see that. You merely 
find that Labour's a little bit — er — inconsiderate, 
sometimes?" 

"Look what happens across the Border! I 
suppose they've told you that little fuss with the 
Japanese in Vancouver was worked from down 
under, haven't they? I don't think our own people 
'ud have done it by themselves." 

"I've heard that several times. Is it quite 
sporting, do you think, to lay the blame on another 
country?" 

" You don't live here. But as I was saying — if we 
get rid of the Japs to-day, we'll be told to get rid of 
some one else to-morrow. There's no limit, sir, to 
what Labour wants. None!" 

"I thought they only want a fair day's wage for a 
fair day's work?" 

"That may do in the Old Country, but here they 
mean to boss the country. They do." 

"And how does the country like it?" 

"We're about sick of it. It don't matter much in 
flush times — employers'll do most anything sooner 
than stop work — but when we come to a pinch, 



LABOUR 181 

you'll hear something. We're a rich land — in spite 
of everything they make out — but we're held up at 
every turn by Labour. Why, there's businesses on 
businesses which friends of mine — in a small way 
like myself — want to start. Businesses in every 
direction — if they was only allowed to start in. But 
thev ain't." 

"That's a pity. Now, what do you think about 
the Japanese question?" 

"I don't think. I know. Both political parties 
are playing up to the Labour vote — if you under- 
stand what that means." 

I tried to understand. 

"And neither side'll tell the truth — that if the 
Asiatic goes, this side of the Continent'll drop out of 
sight, unless we get free white immigration. And 
any party that proposed white immigration on a 
large scale 'ud be snowed under next election. I'm 
telling you what politicians think. Myself, I believe 
if a man stood up to Labour — not that I've any 
feeling against Labour — and just talked sense, a lot 
of people would follow him — quietly, of course. I 
believe he could even get white immigration after a 
while. He'd lose the first election, of course, but in 
the long run . • . We're about sick of Labour. 
I wanted you to know the truth." 

"Thank you. And you don't think any at- 
tempt to bring in white immigration would suc- 
ceed?" 



1 82 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

"Not if it didn't suit Labour. You can try it if 
you like, and see what happens/' 

On that hint I made an experiment in another 
city. There were three men of position, and im- 
portance, and affluence, each keenly interested in 
the development of their land, each asserting that 
what the land needed was white immigrants. And 
we four talked for two hours on the matter — up and 
down and in circles. The one point on which those 
three men were unanimous was, that whatever steps 
were taken to bring people into British Columbia 
from England, by private recruiting or otherwise, 
should be taken secretly. Otherwise the business of 
the people concerned in the scheme would suffer. 

At which point I dropped the Great Question of 
Asiatic Exclusion which is Agitating all our Com- 
munity; and I leave it to you, especially in Australia 
and the Cape, to draw your own conclusions. 

Externally, British Columbia appears to be the 
richest and the loveliest section of the Continent. 
Over and above her own resources she has a fair 
chance to secure an immense Asiatic trade, which 
she urgently desires. Her land, in many places over 
large areas, is peculiarly fitted for the small farmer 
and fruit-grower, who can send his truck to the 
cities. On every hand I heard a demand for labour 
of all kinds. At the same time, in no other part of 
the Continent did I meet so many men who in- 
sistently decried the value and possibilities of their 



LABOUR 183 

country, or who dwelt more fluently on the hard- 
ships and privations' to be endured by the white 
immigrant. I believe that one or two gentlemen 
have gone to England to explain the drawbacks 
viva voce. It is possible that they incur a great 
responsibility in the present, and even a terrible one 
for the future. 



The Fortunate Towns 

After Politics, let us return to the Prairie which 
is the High Veldt, plus Hope, Activity, and Reward. 
Winnipeg is the door to it — a great city in a great 
plain, comparing herself, innocently enough, to 
other cities of her acquaintance, but quite unlike any 
other city. 

When one meets, in her own house, a woman not 
seen since girlhood she is all a stranger till some 
remembered tone or gesture links up to the past, 
and one cries: "It is you after all." But, indeed, 
the child has gone; the woman with her influences 
has taken her place. I tried vainly to recover the 
gawky, graceless city I had known, so unformed and 
so insistent on her shy self. I even ventured to 
remind a man of it. "I remember," he said, smiling, 
"but we were young then. This thing," indicating 
an immense perspective of asphalted avenue that 
dipped under thirty railway tracks, "only came up 
in the last ten years — practically the last five. 
We've had to enlarge all those warehouses yonder 
by adding two or three stories to 'em, and weVe 
hardly begun to go ahead yet. We're just begin- 
ning." 

184 



THE FORTUNATE TOWNS 185 

Warehouses, railway-sidings, and such are only 
counters in the White Man's Game, which can be 
swept up and re-dealt as the play varies. It was the 
spirit in the thin dancing air — the new spirit of the 
new city — which rejoiced me. Winnipeg has Things 
in abundance, but has learned to put them beneath 
her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is older than 
many cities. None the less the Things had to be 
shown — for what shopping is to the woman showing 
off his town is to the right-minded man. First came 
the suburbs — miles on miles of the dainty, clean- 
outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so 
happy and so warm, each unjealously divided from 
its neighbour by the lightest of boundaries. One 
could date them by their architecture, year after 
year, back to the Early 'Nineties, which is when civi- 
lisation began; could guess within a few score dollars 
at their cost and the incomes of their owners, and 
could ask questions about the new domestic appli- 
ances of to-day. 

"Asphalt streets and concrete sidewalks came up a 
few years ago," said our host as we trotted over 
miles of it. "We found it the only way to fight 
the prairie mud. Look!" Where the daring road 
ended, there lay unsubdued, level with the pale 
asphalt, the tenacious prairie, over which civilisa- 
tion fought her hub-deep way to the West. And 
with asphalt and concrete they fight the prairie back 
every building season. Next came the show-houses, 



1 86 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

built by rich men with an eye to the honour and 
glory of their city, which is the first obligation of 
wealth in a new land. 

We twisted and turned among broad, clean, tree- 
lined, sunlit boulevards and avenues, all sluiced 
down with an air that forbade any thought of fa- 
tigue, and talked of city government and municipal 
taxation, till, in a certain silence, we were shown a 
suburb of uncared-for houses, shops, and banks, 
whose sides and corners were rubbed greasy by the 
shoulders of loafers. Dirt and tin cans lay about 
the street. Yet it was not the squalor of poverty 
so much as the lack of instinct to keep clean. One 
race prefers to inhabit there. 

Next a glimpse of a cold, white cathedral, red- 
brick schools almost as big (thank goodness!) as 
some convents; hospitals, institutions, a mile or so 
of shops, and then a most familiar-feeling lunch at a 
Club which would have amazed my Englishman at 
Montreal, where men, not yet old, talked of Fort 
Garry as they remembered it, and tales of the found- 
ing of the city, of early administrative shifts and acci- 
dents, mingled with the younger men's prophecies 
and frivolities. 

There are a few places still left where men can 
handle big things with a light touch, and take more 
for granted in five minutes than an Englishman at 
home could puzzle out in a year. But one would not 
meet many English at a lunch in a London club 



THE FORTUNATE TOWNS 187 

who took the contract for building London Wall or 
helped bully King John into signing Magna Charta. 

I had two views of the city — one on a gray day 
from the roof of a monster building, whence it seemed 
to overflow and fill with noises the whole vast cup of 
the horizon; and still, all round its edge, jets of 
steam and the impatient cries of machinery showed 
it was eating out into the Prairie like a smothered 
fire. 

The other picture was a silhouette of the city's 
flank, mysterious as a line of unexplored cliffs, under 
a sky crimson-barred from the zenith to the ground, 
where it lay, pale emerald behind the uneven ramparts. 
As our train halted in the last of the dusk, and the 
rails glowed dull red, I caught the deep surge of it, 
and seven miles across the purple levels saw the low, 
restless aurora of its lights. It is rather an awesome 
thing to listen to a vanguard of civilisation talking to 
itself in the night in the same tone as a thousand- 
year-old city. 

All the country hereabouts is riddled with railways 
for business and pleasure undreamed of fifteen 
years ago, and it was a long time before we reached 
the clear prairie of air and space and open land. The 
air is different from any air that ever blew; the space 
is ampler than most spaces, because it runs back to 
the unhampered Pole, and the open land keeps the 
secret of its magic as closely as the sea or the desert. 

People here do not stumble against each other 



1 88 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

around corners, but see largely and tranquilly from 
a long way off what they desire, or wish to avoid, 
and they shape their path accordingly across the 
waves, and troughs, and tongues, and dips and fans 
of the land. 

When mere space and the stoop of the high sky 
begin to overwhelm, earth provides little ponds and 
lakes, lying in soft-flanked hollows, where people 
can step down out of the floods of air, and delight 
themselves with small and known distances. Most 
of the women I saw about the houses were down in 
the hollows, and most of the men were on the crests 
and the flats. Once, while we halted a woman drove 
straight down at us from the sky-line, along a golden 
path between black ploughed lands. When the 
horse, who managed affairs, stopped at the cars, she 
nodded mysteriously, and showed us a very small 
baby in the hollow of her arm. Doubtless she was 
some exiled Queen flying North to found a dynasty 
and establish a country. The Prairie makes every- 
thing wonderful. 

They were threshing the wheat on both sides of 
the track as far as the eye could see. The smoke of 
the machines went up in orderly perspective, along- 
side the mounds of chaff — thus : a machine, a house, 
a mound of chaff, a stretch of wheat in stooks — and 
then repeat the pattern over the next few degrees of 
longitude. We ran through strings of nearly touch- 
ing little towns, where I remembered an occasional 



THE FORTUNATE TOWNS 189 

shack; and through big towns once represented by a 
name-board, a siding, and two troopers of the North- 
West Police. In those days men proved that Wheat 
would not grow north of some fool's line, or other, 
or, if it did, that no one would grow it. And now 
the Wheat was marching with us as far as the eye 
could reach; the railways were out, two, three hun- 
dred miles north, peopling a new wheat country; 
and north of that again the Grand Trunk was laying 
down a suburban extension of a few thousand miles 
across the Continent, with branches perhaps to 
Dawson City, certainly to Hudson Bay. 

"Come north and look!" cried the Afrites of the 
Railway. "You're only on the fringe of it here." 
I preferred to keep the old road, and to gape at mir- 
acles accomplished since my day. The old, false- 
fronted, hollow-stomached Western hotels were gone; 
their places filled by five-story brick or stone ones, 
with Post Offices to match. Occasionally some over- 
looked fragment of the past still cleaved to a town, 
and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often 
one had to get a mile away and look back on a place — 
as one holds a palimpsest up against the light — to 
identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings. 
Each town supplied the big farming country behind 
it, and each town school carried the Union Jack 
on a flagstaff in its playground. So far as one could 
understand, the scholars are taught neither to hate, 
nor despise, nor beg from, their own country. 



190 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

I whispered to a man that I was a little tired of a 
three days' tyranny of Wheat, besides being shocked 
at farmers who used clean bright straw for fuel, 
and made bonfires of their chaff-hills. "You're 'way 
behind the times/ 5 said he. "There's fruit and dairy- 
ing and any quantity of mixed farming going for- 
ward all around — let alone irrigation further West. 
Wheat's not our only king by a long sight. Wait 
till you strike such and such a place." It was there 
I met a prophet and a preacher in the shape of a 
Commissioner of the Local Board of Trade (all towns 
have them), who firmly showed me the vegetables 
which his district produced. They were vegetables 
too — all neatly staged in a little kiosk near the 
station. 

I think the pious Thomas Tusser would have 
loved that man. "Providence," said he, shedding 
pamphlets at every gesture, "did not intend ever- 
lasting Wheat in this section. No, sir! Our busi- 
ness is to keep ahead of Providence — to meet her with 
mixed farming. Are you interested in mixed farm- 
ing ? Psha ! Too bad you missed our fruit and vege- 
table show. It draws people together, mixed farm- 
ing does. I don't say Wheat is narrowing to the 
outlook, but I claim there's more sociability and 
money in mixed farming. We've been hypnotized 
by Wheat and Cattle. Now — the cars won't start 
yet awhile — I'll just tell you my ideas." 

For fifteen glorious minutes he gave me condensed 



THE FORTUNATE TOWNS 191 

essence of mixed farming, with excursions into sugar- 
beet (did you know they are making sugar in Al- 
berta?), and he talked of farmyard muck, our dark 
mother of all things, with proper devotion. 

"What we want now," he cried in farewell, "is 
men — more men. Yes, and women." 

They need women sorely for domestic help, to 
meet the mad rush of work at harvest time — maids 
who will help in house, dairy, and chicken-run 
till they are married. 

A steady tide sets that way already; one contented 
settler recruiting others from England; but if a tenth 
of that energy wasted on "social reform" could be 
diverted to decently thought out and supervised 
emigration work ("Labour" does not yet object to 
people working on the land) we might do something 
worth talking about. The races which work and do 
not form Committees are going into the country at 
least as fast as ours. It makes one jealous and afraid 
to watch aliens taking, and taking honestly, so much 
of this treasure of good fortune and sane living. 

There was a town down the road which I had 
first heard discussed nigh twenty years ago by a 
broken-down prospector in a box-car. "Young 
feller," said he, after he had made a professional 
prophecy, "you'll hear of that town if you live. 
She's born lucky." 

I saw the town later — it was a siding by a trestle 
bridge where Indians sold beadwork — and as years 



i 9 2 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

passed I gathered that the old tramp's prophecy 
had come true, and that Luck of some kind had 
struck the little town by the big river. So, this trip, 
I stopped to make sure. It was a beautiful town of 
six thousand people, and a railway junction, beside a 
high-girdered iron bridge; there was a public garden 
with trees at the station. A company of joyous men 
and women, whom that air and that light, and their 
own goodwill, made our brothers and sisters, came 
along in motors, and gave us such a day as never was. 

"What about the Luck?" I asked. 

"Heavens!" said one. "Haven't you heard about 
our natural gas — the greatest natural gas in the 
world? Oh, come and see!" 

I was whirled off to a roundhouse full of engines 
and machinery-shops, worked by natural gas which 
comes out of the earth, smelling slightly of fried 
onions, at a pressure of six hundred pounds, and by 
valves and taps is reduced to four pounds. There 
was Luck enough to make a metropolis. Imagine 
a city's heating and light — to say nothing of power — 
laid on at no greater expense than that of piping! 

"Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?" 
I demanded. 

"Who knows? We're only at the beginning. 
We'll show you a brick-making plant, out on the 
prairie, run by gas. But just now we want to show 
you one of our pet farms." 

Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over 



THE FORTUNATE TOWNS 193 

roads any width you please, and up on to what 
looked like the High Veldt itself. A Major of the 
Mounted Police, who had done a year at the Boer 
war, told us how the ostrich-farm fencing and the lit- 
tle meercats sitting up and racing about South Africa 
had made him homesick for the sight of the gophers 
by the wayside, and the endless panels of wire fencing 
along which we rushed. (The Prairie has nothing 
to learn from the Veldt about fencing, or tricky 
gates.) 

"After all," said the Major, "there's no country 
to touch this. Fve had thirty years of it — from 
one end to the other." 

Then they pointed out all the quarters of the 
horizon — say, fifty miles wherever you turned — 
and gave them names. 

The show farmer had taken his folk to church, 
but we friendly slipped through his gates and reached 
the silent, spick-and-span house, with its trim barn, 
and a vast mound of copper-coloured wheat, piled 
in the sun between two mounds of golden chaff. 
Every one thumbed a sample of it and passed judg- 
ment — it must have been worth a few hundred golden 
sovereigns as it lay, out on the veldt — and we sat 
around, on the farm machinery, and, in the hush 
that a shut-up house always imposes, we seemed to 
hear the lavish earth getting ready for new harvests. 
There was no true wind, but a push, as it were, of the 
whole crystal atmosphere. 



i 9 4 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

"Now for the brickfield!" they cried. It was 
many miles off. The road led by a never-to-be- 
forgotten drop, to a river broad as the Orange at 
Norval's Pont, rustling between mud hills. An old 
Scotchman, in the very likeness of Charon, with 
big hip boots, controlled a pontoon, which sagged 
back and forth by current on a wire rope. The 
reckless motors bumped on to this ferry through a 
foot of water, and Charon, who never relaxed, bore 
us statelily across the dark, broad river to the further 
bank, where we all turned to look at the lucky little 
town, and discuss its possibilities. 

"I think you can see it best from here," said 
one. 

"No, from here," said another, and their voices 
softened on the very name of it. 

Then for an hour we raced over true prairie, great 
yellow-green plains crossed by old buffalo trails,, 
which do not improve motor springs, till a single 
chimney broke the horizon like a mast at sea; and 
thereby were more light-hearted men and women, a 
shed and a tent or two for workmen, the ribs and 
frames of the brick-making mechanism, a fifteen 
foot square shaft sunk, sixty foot down to the clay, 
and, stark and black, the pipe of a natural-gas well. 
The rest was Prairie — the mere curve of the earth — 
with little gray birds calling. 

I thought it could not have been simpler, more 
audacious or more impressive, till I saw some women 



THE FORTUNATE TOWNS 195 

in pretty frocks go up and peer at the hissing gas- 
valves. 

"We fancied that it might amuse you," said 
all those merry people, and between laughter and 
digressions they talked over projects for building, 
first their own, and next other cities, in brick of 
all sorts; giving figures of output and expenses 
of plant that made one gasp. To the eye the affair 
was no more than a novel or delicious picnic. What 
it actually meant was a committee to change the 
material of civilisation for a hundred miles around. 
I felt as though I were assisting at the planning of 
Nineveh; and whatever of good comes to the little 
town that was born lucky I shall always claim a 
share. 

But there is no space to tell how we fed, with 
a prairie appetite, in the men's quarters, on a meal 
prepared by an artist; how we raced home at speeds 
no child could ever hear of, and no grown-up should 
attempt; how the motors squattered at the ford, and 
took pot-shots at the pontoon till even Charon smiled; 
how great horses hauled the motors up the gravelly 
bank into the town; how there we met people in their 
Sunday best, walking and driving, and pulled our- 
selves together, and looked virtuous; and how the 
merry company suddenly and quietly evanished be- 
cause they thought that their guests might be tired. 
I can give you no notion of the pure, irresponsible 
frolic of it — of the almost affectionate kindness, the 



i 9 6 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

gay and inventive hospitality that so delicately con- 
trolled the whole affair — any more than I can describe 
a certain quiet half-hour in the dusk just before we 
left, when the company gathered to say good-bye, 
while young couples walked in the street, and the 
glare of the never-extinguished natural-gas lamps 
coloured the leaves of the trees a stage green. 

It was a woman, speaking out of the shadow, 
who said, what we all felt, "You see, we just love 



our town." 



c< 



So do we," I said, and it slid behind us, 



Mountains and the Pacific 

The Prairie proper ends at Calgary, among the 
cattle-ranches, mills, breweries, and three million 
acre irrigation works. The river that floats timber 
to the town from the mountains does not slide nor 
rustle like Prairie rivers, but brawls across bars of 
blue pebbles, and a greenish tinge in its water hints 
of the snows. 

What I saw of Calgary was crowded into one lively 
half-hour (motors were invented to run about new 
cities). What I heard I picked up, oddly enough, 
weeks later, from a young Dane in the North Sea. 
He was qualmish, but his saga of triumph upheld him. 

'Three years ago I come to Canada by steerage 
— third class. And I have the language to learn. 
Look at me! I have now my own dairy business 
in Calgary, and — look at me! — my own half section, 
that is, three hundred and twenty acres. All my 
land which is mine! And now I come home, first 
class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall 
take out back with me, some friends of mine which 
are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands near 
by Calgary. Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong 
with Canada for a man which works. 5 * 

197 



198 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

"And will your friends go?' 5 I inquired. 

"You bet they will. It is all arranged already. 
I bet they get ready to go now already; and in 
three years they will come back for Christmas here 
in Denmark, first class like me." 

"Then you think Calgary is going ahead?' 5 

"You bet! We are only at the beginning of things. 
Look at me! Chickens? I raise chickens also in 
Calgary," etc., etc. 

After all this pageant of unrelieved material 
prosperity, it was a rest to get to the stillness of the 
big foothills, though they, too, had been inspanned 
for the work of civilisation. The timber off their 
sides was ducking and pitch-poling down their swift 
streams, to be sawn into house-stuff for all the 
world. The woodwork of a purely English villa 
may come from as many Imperial sources as its 
owner's income. 

The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, 
through the winding gateways of the hills, till it 
presented itself, very humbly, before the true moun- 
tains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas. 
Mountains of the pine-cloaked, snow-capped breed 
are unchristian things. 

Men mine into the flanks of some of them, and 
trust to modern science to pull them through. Not 
long ago, a mountain kneeled on a little mining vil- 
lage as an angry elephant kneels; but it did not get 
up again, and the half of that camp was no more seen 



MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC 199 

on earth. The other half still stands — uninhabited. 
The "heathen in his blindness" would have made 
arrangements with the Genius of the Place before he 
ever drove a pick there. As a learned scholar of a 
little-known university once observed to an engineer 
officer on the Himalaya-Tibet Road— "You white 
men gain nothing by not noticing what you cannot 
see. You fall off the road, or the road falls on you, 
and you die, and you think it all an accident. How 
much wiser it was when we were allowed to sacrifice 
a man officially, sir, before making bridges or other 
public works. Then the local gods were officially 
recognized, sir, and did not give any more trouble, 
and the local workmen, sir, were much pleased with 
these precautions." 

There are many local gods on the road through 
the Rockies: old bold mountains that have parted 
with every shred of verdure and stand wrapped 
in sheets of wrinkled silver rock, over which the 
sight travels slowly as in delirium; mad, horned 
mountains, wreathed with dancing mists; low- 
browed and bent-shouldered faquirs of the wayside, 
sitting in meditation beneath a burden of glacier- 
ice that thickens every year; and mountains of fair 
aspect on one side, but on the other seamed with 
hollow sunless clefts, where last year's snow is black- 
ened with this year's dirt and smoke of forest-fires. 
The drip from it seeps away through slopes of un- 
stable gravel and dirt, till, at the appointed season, 



2oo LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

the whole half-mile of undermined talus slips and 
roars into the horrified valley. 

The railway winds in and out among them with 
little inexplicable deviations and side-twists, much 
as a buck walks through a forest-glade, sidling and 
crossing uneasily in what appears to be a plain 
path. Only when the track has rounded another 
shoulder or two, a backward and upward glance at 
some menacing slope, shows why the train did not 
take the easier-looking road on the other side of the 
gorge. 

From time to time the mountains lean apart, 
and nurse between them some golden valley of 
slow streams, fat pastures, and park-like uplands, 
with a little town and cow bells tinkling among 
berry bushes; and children who have never seen 
the sun rise or set, shouting at the trains; and real 
gardens round the houses. 

At Calgary it was a frost, and the dahlias were 
dead. A day later nasturtiums bloomed untouched 
beside the station platforms, and the air was heavy 
and liquid with the breath of the Pacific. One 
felt the spirit of the land change with the changing 
outline of the hills till, on the lower levels by the 
Fraser, it seemed that even the Sussex Downs must 
be nearer at heart to the Prairie than British Colum- 
bia. The Prairie people notice the difference, and 
the Hill people, unwisely, I think, insist on it. Per- 
haps the magic may lie in the scent of strange ever- 



MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC 201 

greens and mosses not known outside the ranges: 
or it may strike from wall to wall of timeless rifts and 
gorges, but it seemed to me to draw out of the great 
sea that washes further Asia — the Asia of allied 
mountains, mines, and forests. 

We rested one day high up in the Rockies, to visit 
a lake carved out of pure jade, whose property is to 
colour every reflection on its bosom to its own tint. 
A belt of brown dead timber on a gravel scar, showed, 
upside down, like sombre cypresses rising from green 
turf and the reflected snows were pale green. In 
summer many tourists go there, but we saw nothing 
except the wonder-working lake lying mute in its 
circle of forest, where red and orange lichens grew 
among gray and blue moss, and we heard nothing 
except the noise of its outfall hurrying through a jam 
of bone-white logs. The thing might have belonged 
to Tibet or some unexplored valley behind Kin- 
chinjunga. It had no concern with the West. 

As we drove along the narrow hill road a piebald 
pack-pony with a china-blue eye came round a bend, 
followed by two women, black-haired, bare-headed, 
wearing beadwork squaw-jackets, and riding straddle. 
A string of pack-ponies trotted through the pines 
behind them. 

"Indians on the move?" said I. "How charac- 
teristic!" 

As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly 
turned her eyes, and they were, past any doubt, the 



202 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

comprehending equal eyes of the civilised white 
women which moved in that berry-brown face. 

"Yes," said our driver, when the cavalcade had 
navigated the next curve, "that'll be Mrs. So-and- 
So and Miss So-and-So. They mostly camp here- 
about for three months every year. I reckon they're 
coming in to the railroad before the snow falls." 

"And whereabout do they go?" I asked. 

"Oh, all about anywheres. If you mean where 
they come from just now — that's the trail yonder." 

He pointed to a hair-crack across the face of a 
mountain, and I took his word for it that it was 
a safe pony-trail. The same evening, at an hotel 
of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty 
evening frock was turning over photographs, and 
the eyes beneath the strictly arranged hair were 
the eyes of the woman in the beadwork jacket 
who had quirted the piebald pack-pony past our 
buggy. 

Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures! 
But do you know any other country where two wo- 
men could go out for a three months' trek and shoot 
in perfect comfort and safety? 

These mountains are only ten days from London, 
and people more and more use them for pleasure- 
grounds. Other and most unthought-of persons 
buy little fruit-farms in British Columbia as an excuse 
for a yearly visit to the beautiful land, and they 
tempt yet more people from England. This is 



MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC 203 

apart from the regular tide of emigration, and serves 
to make the land known. If you asked a State- 
owned railway to gamble on the chance of drawing 
tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove 
to you that the experiment could never succeed, and 
that it was wrong to risk the taxpayers' money in 
erecting first-class hotels. Yet South Africa could, 
even now, be made a tourists 5 place— if only the rail- 
roads and steamship lines had faith. 

On thinking things over I suspect I was not in- 
tended to appreciate the merits of British Columbia 
too highly. Maybe I misjudged; maybe she was 
purposely misrepresented; but I seemed to hear 
more about "problems" and "crises" and "situa- 
tions" in her borders than anywhere else. So far 
as eye or ear could gather, the one urgent problem 
was to find enough men and women to do the work 
in hand. 

Lumber, coal, minerals, fisheries, fit soil for fruit, 
dairy, and poultry farms are all there in a superb 
climate. The natural beauty of earth and sky match 
these lavish gifts; to which are added thousands of 
miles of safe and sheltered waterways for coastal 
trade; deep harbours that need no dredge; the 
ground-works of immense and ice-free ports — all the 
title-deeds to half the trade of Asia. For the people's 
pleasure and good disport salmon, trout, quail, and 
pheasant play in front of and through the suburbs 
of her capitals. A little axe-work and road-metalling 



204 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

gives a city one of the loveliest water-girt parks 
that we have outside the tropics. Another town 
is presented with a hundred islands, knolls, wooded 
coves, stretches of beach, and dingles, laid down as 
expressly for camp-life, picnics, and boating parties, 
beneath skies never too hot and rarely too cold. 
If they care to lift up their eyes from their almost 
subtropical gardens they can behold snowy peaks 
across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. 
Though they face a sea out of which any portent 
may arise, they are not forced to protect or even to 
police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, 
murrain, pestilence locusts, and blight, as they are 
of the true meaning of want and fear. 

Such a land is good for an energetic man. It 
is also not so bad for the loafer. I was, as I have 
told you, instructed on its drawbacks. I was to 
understand that there was no certainty in any em- 
ployment; and that a man who earned immense 
wages for six months of the year would have to be 
kept by the community if he fell out of work for the 
other six. I was not to be deceived by golden pic- 
tures set before me by interested parties (that is to 
say, by almost every one I met), and I was to give 
due weight to the difficulties and discouragements 
that beset the intending immigrant. Were I an 
intending immigrant I would risk a good deal of dis- 
comfort to get on to the land in British Columbia; 
and were I rich, with no attachments outside Eng- 



MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC 205 

land, I would swiftly buy me a farm or a house in 
that country for the mere joy of it. 

I forgot those doleful and unhumorous conspir- 
ators among people who fervently believed in the 
place; but afterwards the memory left a bad taste in 
my mouth. Cities, like women, cannot be too care- 
ful what sort of men they allow to talk about them. 

Time had changed Vancouver literally out of all 
knowledge. From the station to the suburbs, and 
back to the wharves, every step was strange, and 
where I remembered open spaces and still untouched 
timber, the tramcars were fleeting people out to a 
lacrosse game. Vancouver is an aged city, for only a 
few days previous to my arrival the Vancouver Baby 
— i. e. 9 the first child born in Vancouver — had been 
married. 

A steamer — once familiar in Table Bay — had 
landed a few hundred Sikhs and Punjabi jats — to 
each man his bundle — and the little groups walked 
uneasy alone, keeping, for many of them had been 
soldiers, to the military step. Yes, they said they 
had come to this country to get work. News had 
reached their villages that work at great wages was 
to be had in this country. Their brethren who had 
gone before had sent them the news. Yes, and some- 
times the money for the passage out. The money 
would be paid back from the so-great wages to come. 
With interest? Assuredly with interest. Did men 
lend money for nothing in any country ? They were 



2o6 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

waiting for their brethren to come and show them 
where to eat, and later, how to work. Meanwhile 
this was a new country. How could they say any- 
thing about it? No, it was not like Gurgaon or 
Shahpur or Jullundur. The Sickness (plague) had 
come to all these places. It had come into the Pun- 
jab by every road, and many — many — many had 
died. The crops, too, had failed in some districts. 
Hearing the news about these so-great wages they 
had taken ship for the belly's sake — for the money's 
sake — for the children's sake. 

" Would they go back again?" 

They grinned as they nudged each other. The 
Sahib had not quite understood. They had come 
over for the sake of the money — the rupees, no, the 
dollars. The Punjab was their home where their 
villages lay, where their people were waiting. With- 
out doubt — without doubt — they would go back. 
Then came the brethren already working in the mills 
— cosmopolitans dressed in ready-made clothes, and 
smoking cigarettes. 

"This way, O you people," they cried. The 
bundles were reshouldered and the turbaned knots 
melted away. The last words I caught were true 
Sikh talk: "But what about the money, O my 
brother?" 

Some Punjabis have found out that money can be 
too dearly bought. 

There was a Sikh in a sawmill, had been driver 



MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC 207 

in a mountain battery at home. Himself he was 
from Amritsan (Oh, pleasant as cold water in 
a thirsty land is the sound of a familiar name in a 
fair country!) 

"But you had your pension. Why did you come 
here?" 

"Heaven-born, because my sense was little. 
And there was also the Sickness at Amritsar." 

(The historian a hundred years hence will be 
able to write a book on economic changes brought 
about by pestilence. There is a very interesting 
study somewhere of the social and commercial 
effects of the Black Death in England.) 

In a wharf, waiting for a steamer, some thirty 
Sikhs, many of them wearing their old uniforms 
(which should not be allowed) were talking at the 
tops of their voices, so that the shed rang like an 
Indian railway station. A suggestion that if they 
spoke lower life would be easier was instantly 
adopted. Then a senior officer with a British India 
medal asked hopefully: "Has the Sahib any orders 
where we are to go?" 

Alas he had none — nothing but goodwill and 
greetings for the sons of the Khalsa, and they 
tramped off in fours. 

It is said that when the little riot broke out in 
Vancouver these "heathen" were invited by other 
Asiatics to join in defending themselves against 
the white man. They refused on the ground that 



2o8 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

they were subjects of the King. I wonder what tales 
they sent back to their villages, and where, and 
how fully, every detail of the affair was talked over. 
White men forget that no part of the Empire can live 
or die to itself. 

Here is a rather comic illustration of this on 
the material side. The wonderful waters between 
Vancouver and Victoria are full of whales, leaping 
and rejoicing in the strong blue all about the steamer. 
There is, therefore, a whalery on an island near by, 
and I had the luck to travel with one of the share- 
holders. 

"Whales are beautiful beasts," he said affec- 
tionately. "We've a contract with a Scotch firm 
for every barrel of oil we can deliver for years ahead. 
It's reckoned the best for harness-dressing." 

He went on to tell me how a swift ship goes hunt- 
ing whales with a bomb-gun and explodes shells into 
their insides so that they perish at once. 

"All the old harpoon and boat business would 
take till the cows come home. We kill 'em right 
off." 

"And how d'you strip 'em?" 

It seemed that the expeditious ship carried also 
a large air-pump, and pumped up the carcass to 
float roundly till she could attend to it. At the 
end of her day's kill she would return, towing some- 
times as many as four inflated whales to the whalery, 
which is a factory full of modern appliances. The 



MOUNTAINS AND THE PACIFIC 209 

whales are hauled up inclined planes like logs to a 
sawmill, and as much of them as will not make oil 
for the Scotch leather-dresser, or cannot be dried 
for the Japanese market, is converted into potent 
manure. 

"No manure can touch ours," said the share- 
holder. "It's so rich in bone, d'you see. The 
only thing that has beat us up to date is their hides; 
but we've fixed up a patent process now for turning 
'em into floorcloth. Yes, they're beautiful beasts. 
That fellow," he pointed to a black hump in a wreath 
of spray, "would cut up a miracle." 

"If you go on like this you won't have any whales 
left," I said. 

"That is so. But the concern pays 30 per cent., 
and — a few years back, no one believed in it." 

I forgave him everything for the last sentence. 



A Conclusion 

Canada possesses two pillars of Strength and Beauty 
in Quebec and Victoria. The former ranks by her- 
self among those Mother-cities of whom none can say 
"This reminds me." To realize Victoria you must 
take all that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, 
Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at 
Hongkong, the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; 
add reminiscences of the Thousand Islands, and 
arrange the whole round the Bay of Naples, with 
some Himalayas for the background. 

Real estate agents recommend it as a little piece 
of England — the island on which it stands is about 
the size of Great Britain — but no England is set in 
any such seas or so fully charged with the mystery of 
the larger ocean beyond. The high, still twilights 
along the beaches are out of the old East just under 
the curve of the world, and even in October the sun 
rises warm from the first. Earth, sky, and water 
wait outside every man's door to drag him out 
to play if he looks up from his work; and, though 
some other cities in the Dominion do not quite under- 
stand this immoral mood of Nature, men who have 
made their money in them go off to Victoria, and 

210 



A CONCLUSION zit 

with the zeal of converts preach and preserve its 
beauties. 

We went to look at a marine junk-store which 
had once been Esquimalt, a station of the British 
Navy. It was reached through winding roads, 
lovelier than English lanes, along watersides and 
parkways any one of which would have made the 
fortune of a town. 

"Most cities," a man said, suddenly, "lay out 
their roads at right angles. We do in the business 
quarters. What d'you think?" 

"I fancy some of those big cities will have to 
spend millions on curved roads some day for the 
sake of a change," I said. "You've got what no 
money can buy." 

"That's what the men tell us who come to live 
in Victoria. And they've had experience." 

It is pleasant to think of the Western million- 
aire, hot from some gridiron of rectangular civilisa- 
tion, confirming good Victorians in the policy of 
changing vistas and restful curves. 

There is a view, when the morning mists peel 
off the harbour where the steamers tie up, of the 
Houses of Parliament on one hand, and a huge 
hotel on the other, which as an example of cun- 
ningly fitted-in water-fronts and facades is worth a 
very long journey. The hotel was just being finished. 
The ladies' drawing-room, perhaps a hundred feet 
by forty, carried an arched and superbly enriched 



212 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

plaster ceiling of knops and arabesques and inter- 
lacings, which somehow seemed familiar. 

"We saw a photo of it in Country Life" the 
contractor explained. "It seemed just what the 
room needed, so one of our plasterers, a French- 
man — that's him — took and copied it. It comes 
in all right, doesn't it?" 

About the time the noble original was put up 
in England Drake might have been sailing some- 
where off this very coast. So, you see, Victoria 
lawfully holds the copyright. 

I tried honestly to render something of the colour, 
the gaiety, and the graciousness of the town and the 
island, but only found myself piling up unbelievable 
adjectives, and so let it go with a hundred other won- 
ders and repented that I had wasted my time and 
yours on the anxious-eyed gentlemen who talked of 
" drawbacks." A verse cut out of a newspaper seems 
to sum up their attitude: 

As the Land of Little Leisure 
Is the place where things are done, 
So the Land of Scanty Pleasure 
Is the place for lots of fun. 
In the Land of Plenty Trouble 
People laugh and people should, 
But there's some one always kicking 
In the Land of Heap Too Good! 

At every step of my journey people assured me 
that I had seen nothing of Canada. Silent mining 



A CONCLUSION 213 

men from the North; fruit-farmers from the Okan- 
agan Valley; foremen of railway gangs, not so long 
from English public schools; the oldest inhabitant 
of the town of Villeneuve, aged twenty-eight; cer- 
tain English who lived on the prairie and contrived 
to get fun and good fellowship as well as money; 
the single-minded wheat-growers and cattle-men; 
election agents; police troopers expansive in the dusk 
of wayside halts; officials dependent on the popular 
will, who talked as delicately as they walked; and 
queer souls who did not speak English, and said so 
loudly in the dining-car — each, in his or her own way, 
gave me to understand this. My excursion bore the 
same relation to their country as a 'bus-ride down 
the Strand bears to London, so I knew how they 
felt. 

The excuse is that our own flesh and blood are 
more interesting than anybody else, and I held 
by birth the same right in them and their lives 
as they held in any other part of the Empire. Be- 
cause they had become a people within the Empire 
that right was admitted and no word spoken, which 
would not have been the case a few years ago. One 
may mistake many signs on the road, but there is 
no mistaking the spirit of sane and realised nation- 
ality, which fills the land from end to end precisely 
as the joyous hum of a big dynamo well settled to its 
load makes a background to all the other shop noises. 
For many reasons that Spirit came late, but since 



2i 4 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

it has come after the day of little things, doubts, and 
open or veiled contempts, there is less danger that it 
will go astray among the boundless wealth and luxury 
that await it. The people, the schools, the churches, 
the Press in its degree, and, above all, the women, 
understand without manifestoes that their land 
must now as always abide under the Law in deed 
and in word and in thought. This is their caste- 
mark, the ark of their covenant, their reason for 
being what they are. In the big cities, with their 
village-like lists of police court offences; in the wide- 
open little Western towns where the present is as 
free as the lives and the future as safe as the property 
of their inhabitants; in the coast cities galled and 
humiliated at their one night's riot ("It's not our 
habit, Sir! It's not our habit!"); up among the 
mountains where the officers of the law track and 
carefully bring into justice the astounded malefac- 
tor; and behind the orderly prairies to the barren 
grounds, as far as a single white man can walk, the 
relentless spirit of the breed follows up, and oversees, 
and controls. It does not much express itself in 
words, but sometimes, in intimate discussion, one 
is privileged to catch a glimpse of the inner fires. 
They burn hotly. 

"We do not mean to be de-civilised," said the 
first man with whom I talked about it. 

That was the answer throughout — the keynote 
and the explanation. 



A CONCLUSION 215 

Otherwise, the Canadians are as human as the rest 
of us to evade or deny a plain issue. The duty of 
developing their country is always present, but 
when it comes to taking thought, better thought, 
for her defence, they refuge behind loose words and 
childish anticipations of miracles — quite in the best 
Imperial manner. All admit that Canada is wealthy; 
few that she is weak; still fewer that, unsupported, 
she would very soon cease to exist as a nation. The 
anxious inquirer is told that she does her duty towards 
England by developing her resources; that wages 
are so high a paid army is out of the question; 
that she is really maturing splendid defence schemes, 
but must not be hurried or dictated to; that a little 
wise diplomacy is all that will ever be needed in this 
so civilised era; that when the evil day comes some- 
thing will happen (it certainly will), the whole con- 
cluding, very often, with a fervent essay on the im- 
morality of war, about as much to the point as carry- 
ing a dove through the streets to allay a pestilence. 

The question before Canada is not what she thinks 
or pays, but what an enemy may think it necessary 
to make her pay. If she continues wealthy and re- 
mains weak she will surely be attacked under one 
pretext or another. Then she will go under, and her 
spirit will return to the dust with her flag as it slides 
down the halliards. 

That is absurd, " is always the quick answer. 
In her own interests England could never permit 






216 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

it. What you speak of presupposes the fall of 
England." 

Not necessarily. Nothing worse than a stumble 
by the way; but when England stumbles the Empire 
shakes. Canada's weakness is lack of men. Eng- 
land's weakness is an excess of voters who propose 
to live at the expense of the State. These loudly 
resent that any money should be diverted from 
themselves; and since money is spent on fleets and 
armies to protect the Empire while it is consolidating, 
they argue that if the Empire ceased to exist arma- 
ments would cease too, and the money so saved could 
be spent on their proper comforts. They pride 
themselves on being an avowed and organized en- 
emy of the Empire which, as others see it, waits 
only to give them health, prosperity, and power 
beyond anything their votes could win them in 
England. But their leaders need their votes in 
England, as they need their outcries and discomforts 
to help them in their municipal and Parliamentary 
careers. No engineer lowers steam in his own 
boilers. 

So they are told little except evil of the great heri- 
tage outside, and are kept compounded in cities 
under promise of free rations and amusements. If 
the Empire were threatened they would not, in their 
own interests, urge England to spend men and money 
on it. Consequently it might be well if the nations 
within the Empire were strong enough to endure a 



A CONCLUSION 217 

little battering unaided at the first outset — till such 
time, that is, as England were permitted to move to 
their help. 

For this end an influx of good men is needed 
more urgently every year during which peace holds — 
men loyal, clean, and experienced in citizenship, 
with women not ignorant of sacrifice. 

Here the gentlemen who propose to be kept 
by their neighbours are our helpful allies. They 
have succeeded in making uneasy the class immedi- 
ately above them, which is the English working class 
as yet undebauched by the temptation of State-aided 
idleness or State-guaranteed irresponsibility. Eng- 
land has millions of such silent careful folk accus- 
tomed, even yet, to provide for their own offspring, 
to bring them up in a resolute fear of God, and to 
desire no more than the reward of their own labours. 
A few years ago this class would not have cared to 
shift; now they feel the general disquiet. They live 
close to it. Tea-and-sugar borrowing friends have 
told them jocularly, or with threats, of a good time 
coming when things will go hard with the uncheer- 
ful giver. The prospect appeals neither to their 
reason nor to their Savings Bank books. They hear 
— they do not need to read — the speeches delivered 
in their streets on a Sunday morning. It is one of 
their pre-occupations to send their children to Sun- 
day School by roundabout roads, lest they should 
pick up abominable blasphemies. When the tills 



218 LETTERS TO THE FAMILY 

of the little shops are raided, or when the family 
ne'er-do-well levies on his women with more than 
usual brutality, they know, because they suffer, what 
principles are being put into practice. If these 
people could quietly be shown a quiet way out of 
it all, very many of them would call in their savings 
(they are richer than they look), and slip quietly 
away. In the English country, as well as in the 
towns, there is a feeling— not yet panic, but the dull 
edge of it — that the future will be none too rosy for 
such as are working, or are in the habit of working. 
This is all to our advantage. 

Canada can best serve her own interests and those 
of the Empire by systematically exploiting this new 
recruiting-ground. Now that South Africa, with the 
exception of Rhodesia, has been paralysed, and 
Australia has not yet learned the things which belong 
to her peace, Canada has the chance of the century 
to attract good men and capital into the Dominion. 
But the men are much more important than the 
money. They may not at first be as clever with the 
hoe as the Bessarabian or the Bokhariot, or whatever 
the fashionable breed is, but they have qualities of 
pluck, good humour, and a certain well-wearing 
virtue which are not altogether bad; they will not 
hold aloof from the life of the land, nor pray in 
unknown tongues to Byzantine saints; while the 
very tenacity and caution which made them cleave 
to England this long, help them to root deeply else- 



A CONCLUSION 219 

where. They are more likely to bring their women 
than other classes, and those women will make 
sacred and individual homes. A little regarded 
Crown Colony has a proverb that no district can be 
called settled till there are pots of musk in the house- 
windows — sure sign that an English family has come 
to stay. It is not certain how much of the present 
steamer-dumped foreign population has any such 
idea. We have seen a financial panic in one country 
send whole army corps of aliens kiting back to the 
lands whose allegiance they forswore. What would 
they or their likes do in time of real stress, since no 
instinct in their bodies or their souls would call them 
to stand by till the storm were over? 

Surely the conclusion of the whole matter through- 
out the whole Empire must be men and women of 
our own stock, habits, language, and hopes brought 
in by every possible means under a well-settled 
policy ? Time will not be allowed us to multiply to 
unquestionable peace, but by drawing upon England 
we can swiftly transfuse what we need of her strength 
into her veins, and by that operation bleed her into 
health and sanity. 

Meantime, the only serious enemy to the Empire, 
within or without, is that very Democracy which 
depends on the Empire for its proper comforts, and 
in whose behalf these things are urged. 



EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 
1913 

Sea Travel. 

A Return to the East. 

A Serpent of the Nile. 

Up the River. 

Dead Kings. 

The Face of the Desert. 

The Riddle of Empire. 



And the magicians of Egypt did so with their 
enchantments, — Exodus vii. 22. 



I 

Sea Travel 

I had left Europe for no reason except to discover the 
sun, and there were rumours that he was to be found 
in Egypt. 

But I had not realized what more I should find there. 

A P. & O. boat carried us out of Marseilles. A 
serang of lascars, with whistle, chain, shawl, and 
fluttering blue clothes, was at work on the baggage- 
hatch. Somebody bungled at the winch. The 
serang called him a name unlovely in itself but 
awakening delightful memories in the hearer. 

"O Serang, is that man a fool?" 

"Very foolish, sahib. He comes from Surat. He 
only comes for his food's sake." 

The serang grinned; the Surtee man grinned; the 
winch began again, and the voices that called: 
"Lower away! Stop her!" were as familiar as the 
friendly whiff from the lascars' galley or the slap 
of bare feet along the deck. But for the passage of a 
few impertinent years, I should have gone without 
hesitation to share their rice. Serangs used to be very 
kind to little white children below the age of caste. 
Most familiar of all was the ship itself. It had 

223 



224 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

slipped my memory, nor was there anything in the 
rates charged to remind me that single-screws still 
lingered in the gilt-edged passenger trade. 

Some North Atlantic passengers accustomed to 
real ships made the discovery, and were as pleased 
about it as American tourists at Stratford-on-Avon. 

"Oh, come and see!" they cried. "She has one 
screw — only one screw! Hear her thump! And 
have you seen their old barn of a saloon ? And the 
officers' library? It's open for two half-hours a day 
week-days and one on Sundays. You pay a dollar 
and a quarter deposit on each book. We wouldn't 
have missed this trip for anything. It's like sailing 
with Columbus." 

They wandered about — voluble, amazed, and 
happy, for they were getting off at Port Said. 

I explored, too. From the rough-ironed table 
linen, the thick tooth-glasses for the drinks, the 
slummocky set-out of victuals at meals, to the 
unaccommodating regulations in the curtainless 
cabin, where they had not yet arrived at bunk-edge 
trays for morning tea, time and progress had stood 
still with the P. & O. To be just, there were electric 
fan-fittings in the cabins, but the fans were charged 
extra; and there was a rumour, unverified, that one 
could eat on deck or in one's cabin without a medical 
certificate from the doctor. All the rest was under 
the old motto: "Quis separabit"— "This is quite 
separate from other lines." 



SEA TRAVEL 225 

"After all," said an Anglo-Indian, whom I was 
telling about civilised ocean travel, "they don't 
want you Egyptian trippers. They're sure of us 

because " and he gave me many strong reasons 

connected with leave, finance, the absence of competi- 
tion, and the ownership of the Bombay fore-shore. 

"But it's absurd," I insisted. "The whole con- 
cern is out of date. There's a notice on my deck 
forbidding smoking and the use of naked lights, and 
there's a lascar messing about the hold-hatch outside 
my cabin with a candle in a lantern." 

Meantime, our one-screw tub thumped gingerly 
toward Port Said, because we had no mails aboard, 
and the Mediterranean, exhausted after severe Febru- 
ary hysterics, lay out like oil. 

I had some talk with a Scotch quartermaster who 
complained that lascars are not what they used to be, 
owing to their habit (but it has existed since the be- 
ginning) of signing on as a clan or family — all sorts 
together. 

The serang said that, for his part, he had noticed no 
difference in twenty years. "Men are always of 
many kinds, sahib. And that is because God makes 
men this and that. Not all one pattern — not by 
any means all one pattern." He told me, too, that 
wages were rising, but the price of ghee, rice, and 
curry-stufFs was up, too, which was bad for wives 
and families at Porbandar. "And that also is thus, 
and no talk makes it otherwise." After Suez, he 



226 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

would have blossomed into thin clothes and a long 
talk, but the bitter spring chill nipped him, as the 
thought of partings just accomplished and work just 
ahead chilled the Anglo-Indian contingent. Little by 
little one came at the outlines of the old stories — a 
sick wife left behind here, a boy there, a daughter 
at school, a very small daughter trusted to friends 
or hirelings, certain separation for so many years 
and no great hope or delight in the future. It 
was not a nice India that the tales hinted at. Here 
is one that explains a great deal: 

There was a Pathan, a Mohammedan, in a Hindu 
village, employed by the village money-lender as a 
debt-collector, which is not a popular trade. He 
lived alone among Hindus, and — so ran the charge 
in the lower court — he wilfully broke the caste of a 
Hindu villager by forcing on him forbidden Mussul- 
man food, and when that pious villager would have 
taken him before the headman to make reparation, 
the godless one drew his Afghan knife and killed the 
head man, besides wounding a few others. The 
evidence ran without flaw, as smoothly as well- 
arranged cases should, and the Pathan was con- 
demned to death for wilful murder. He appealed 
and, by some arrangement or other, got leave to state 
his case personally to the Court of Revision. Said, 
I believe, that he did not much trust lawyers, but 
that if the sahibs would give him a hearing, as man 
to man, he might have a run for his money. 



SEA TRAVEL 227 

Out of the jail> then, he came, and, Pathanlike, 
not content with his own good facts, must needs be- 
gin by some fairy-tale that he was a secret agent of 
the government sent down to spy on that village. 
Then he warmed to it. Yes, he was that money- 
lender's agent — a persuader of the reluctant, if you 
like — working for a Hindu employer. Naturally, 
many men owed him grudges. A lot of the evidence 
against him was quite true, but the prosecution had 
twisted it abominably. About that knife, for in- 
stance. True, he had a knife in his hand exactly as 
they had alleged. But why? Because with that 
very knife he was cutting up and distributing a roast 
sheep which he had given as a feast to the villagers. 
At that feast, he sitting in amity with all his world, 
the village rose up at the word of command, laid 
hands on him, and dragged him off to the head 
man's house. How could he have broken any man's 
caste when they were all eating his sheep ? And in 
the courtyard of the head man's house they sur- 
rounded him with heavy sticks and worked them- 
selves into anger against him, each man exciting his 
neighbour. He was a Pathan. He knew what 
that sort of talk meant. A man cannot collect debts 
without making enemies. So he warned them. 
Again and again he warned them, saying: " Leave 
me alone. Do not lay hands on me." But the 
trouble grew worse, and he saw it was intended that 
he should be clubbed to death like a jackal in a drain. 



228 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

Then he said, "If blows are struck, I strike, and / 
strike to kill, because I am a Pathan." But the 
blows were struck, heavy ones. Therefore, with the 
very Afghan knife that had cut up the mutton, he 
struck the head man. "Had you meant to kill the 
headman?" "Assuredly! I am a Pathan. When 
I strike, I strike to kill. I had warned them again 
and again. I think I got him in the liver. He 
died. And that is all there is to it, sahibs. It was 
my life or theirs. They would have taken mine 
over my freely given meats. JVW, what'll you do 
with me?" 

In the long run, he got several years for culpable 
homicide. 

"But," said I, when the tale had been told, "what- 
ever made the lower court accept all that village evi- 
dence ? It was too good on the face of it." 

"The lower court said it could not believe it possi- 
ble that so many respectable native gentlemen 
could have banded themselves together to tell a 
lie." 

"Oh! Had the lower court been long in the 
country?" 

"It was a native judge," was the reply. 

If you think this over in all its bearings, you will 
see that the lower court was absolutely sincere. 
Was not the lower court itself a product of Western 
civilisation, and, as such, bound to play up — to 
pretend to think along Western lines — translating 



SEA TRAVEL 229 

each grade of Indian village society into its English 
equivalent, and ruling as an English judge would 
have ruled? Pathans and, incidentally, English 
officials must look after themselves. 

There is a fell disease of this century called "snob- 
bery of the soul." Its germ has been virulently 
developed in modern cultures from the uncomplex 
bacillus isolated sixty years ago by the late William 
Makepeace Thackeray. Precisely as Major Ponto, 
with his plated dishes and stable-boy masquerading 
as footman, lied to himself and his guests so — but 
the "Book of Snobs" can only be brought up to date 
by him who wrote it. 

Then, a man struck in from the Sudan — far and 
far to the south — with a story of a discomposed 
judge and a much too collected prisoner. 

To the great bazaars of Omdurman, where all 
things are sold, came a young man from the utter- 
most deserts of somewhere or other and heard a 
gramophone. Life was of no value to him till he 
had bought the creature. He took it back to. his 
village, and at twilight set it going among his rav- 
ished friends. His father, sheik of the village, 
came also, listened to the loud shoutings without 
breath, the strong music lacking musicians, and said, 
justly enough: "This thing is a devil. You must 
not bring devils into my village. Lock it up." 

They waited until he had gone away and then 
began another tune. A second time the sheik came, 



2 3 o EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

repeated the command, and added that if the singing 
box was heard again, he would slay the buyer. But 
their curiosity and joy defied even this, and for the 
third time (late at night) they slipped in pin and rec- 
ord and let the djinn rave. So the sheik, with his 
rifle, shot his son as he had promised, and the English 
judge before whom he eventually came had all the 
trouble in the world to save that earnest gray head 
from the gallows. Thus: 

"Now, old man, you must say guilty or not 
guilty/' 

" But I shot him. That is why I am here. I " 

"Hush! It is a form of words which the law asks. 
(Sotto voce. Write down that the old idiot doesn't 
understand.) Be still now." 

"But I shot him. What else could I have done? 
He bought a devil in a box, and " 

"Quiet! That comes later. Leave talking." 

"But I am sheik of the village. One must not 
bring devils into a village. I said I would shoot 
him." 

"This matter is in the hands of the law. I 
judge." 

"What need? I shot him. Suppose that your 
son had brought a devil in a box to your village " 

They explained to him, at last, that under British 
rule fathers must hand over devil-dealing children to 
be shot by the white men (the first step, you see, 
on the downward path of state aid), and that he must 



SEA TRAVEL 231 

go to prison for several months for interfering with a 
government shoot. 

We are a great race. There was a pious young 
judge in Nigeria once, who kept a condemned pris- 
oner waiting very many minutes while he hunted 
through the Hausa dictionary, word by word, for, 
"May — God — have — mercy — on — your — soul." 

And I heard another tale — about the Suez Canal 
this time — a hint of what may happen some day at 
Panama. There was a tramp steamer, loaded with 
high explosives, on her way to the East, and at the 
far end of the canal one of the sailors very naturally 
upset a lamp in the foc'sle. After a heated interval 
the crew took to the desert alongside, while the cap- 
tain and the mate opened all cocks and sank her, 
not in the fairway but up against a bank, just leav- 
ing room for a steamer to squeeze past. Then the 
canal authorities wired to her charterers to know 
exactly what there might be in her; and it is said that 
the reply kept them awake of nights, for it was their 
business to blow her up. 

Meantime, traffic had to go through, and a P. & 
O. steamer came along. There was the canal; there 
was the sunken wreck, marked by one elderly Arab 
in a little boat with a red flag, and there was about 
five foot clearance on each side for the P. & O. She 
went through a-tiptoe, because even fifty tons of 
dynamite will jar a boat perceptibly, and the tramp 
held more — very much more, not to mention detona- 



232 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

tors. By some absurd chance, almost the only pas- 
senger who knew about the thing at the time was an 
old lady rather proud of the secret. 

"Ah," she said, in the middle of the agonised 
glide, "you may depend upon it that if everybody 
knew what / know, they'd all be on the other side 
of the ship." 

Later on, the authorities blew up the tramp with 
infinite precautions from some two miles off, for 
which reason she neither destroyed the Suez Canal 
nor dislocated the Sweet Water Canal alongside, 
but merely dug out a hole a hundred feet or a hundred 
yards deep, and so vanished from Lloyds' register. 

But no stories could divert one long from the 
peculiarities of that amazing line which exists 
strictly for itself. There was a bathroom (occu- 
pied) at the windy end of an open alleyway. In 
due time the bather came out. 

Said the steward, as he swabbed out the tub for 
his successor: "That was the chief engineer. 'E's 
been some time. Must 'ave 'ad a mucky job below, 
this mornin'." 

I have a great admiration for chief engineers. 
They are men in authority, needing all the com- 
forts and aids that can possibly be given them — 
such as bathrooms of their own close to their own 
cabins, where they can clean off at leisure. 

It is not fair to mix them up with the ruck of 
passengers, nor is it done on real ships. Nor, when a 



SEA TRAVEL 233 

passenger wants a bath in the evening, do the stew- 
ards of real ships roll their eyes like vergers in a 
cathedral and say, "We'll see if it can be managed/' 
They double down the alleyway and shout, 
"Matcham" or "Ponting" or "Guttman," and in 
fifteen seconds one of those swift three has the taps 
going and the towels out. Real ships are not an- 
nexes of Westminster Abbey or Borstal Reformatory. 
They supply decent accommodation in return for 
good money, and I imagine that their directors in- 
struct their staffs to look pleased while at work. 

Some generations back there must have been an 
idea that the P. & O. was vastly superior to all lines 
afloat — a sort of semipontifical show not to be criti- 
cised. How much of the notion was due to its own 
excellence and how much to its passenger-traffic mo- 
nopoly does not matter. To-day, it neither feeds nor 
tends its passengers, nor keeps its ships well enough 
to put on any airs at all. 

For which reason, human nature being what 
it is, it surrounds itself with an ungracious atmos- 
phere of absurd ritual to cover grudged and in- 
adequate performance. 

What it really needs is to be dropped into a March 
North Atlantic, without any lascars, and made to 
swim for its life between a C.P.R. boat and a North 
German Lloyd — till it learns to smile. 



II 

A Return to the East 

The East is a much larger slice of the world than 
Europeans care to admit. Some say it begins at 
St. Gothard, where the smells of two continents meet 
and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car 
dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at Ven- 
ice on warm April mornings. But the East is wher- 
ever one sees the lateen sail — that shark's fin of a 
rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white 
bathers round the Mediterranean. There is still a 
suggestion of menace, a hint of piracy, in the blood 
whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or fruiting or 
coasting. 

"This is not my ancestral trade," she whispers 
to the accomplice sea. "If everybody had their 
rights I should be doing something quite different; 
for my father, he was the Junk, and my mother, 
she was the Dhow, and between the two of 'em 
they made Asia." Then she tacks, disorderly but 
deadly quick, and shuffles past the unimaginative 
steam-packet with her hat over one eye and a knife, 
as it were, up her baggy sleeves. 

Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty 

234 



A RETURN TO THE EAST 235 

extensions, show their untamed descent beneath their 
loaded clumsiness. They are all children of the 
camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief 
but it was very good to meet them again in raw sun- 
shine, unchanged in any rope and patch. 

Old Port Said had disappeared beneath acres of 
new buildings where one could walk at leisure without 
being turned back by soldiers. 

Two or three landmarks remained; two or three 
were reported as still in existence, and one Face 
showed itself after many years — ravaged but re- 
spectable — rigidly respectable. 

"Yes," said the Face, "I have been here all the 
time. But I have made money, and when I die I 
am going home to be buried." 

"Why not go home before you are buried, O Face?" 

"Because I have lived here so long. Home is 
only good to be buried in." 

"And what do you do, nowadays?" 

"Nothing now. I live on my rentes — my in- 
come." 

Think of it ! To live icily in a perpetual cinema- 
tograph show of excited, uneasy travellers; to watch 
huge steamers sliding in and out all day and all night 
like railway trucks, unknowing and unsought by a 
single soul aboard; to talk five or six tongues indif- 
ferently, but to have no country — no interest in any 
earth except one reservation in a Continental ceme- 
tery. 



236 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

It was a cold evening after heavy rain and the 
half-flooded streets reeked. But we undefeated 
tourists ran about in droves and saw all that could 
be seen before train-time. We missed, most of us, 
the Canal Company's garden, which happens to 
mark a certain dreadful and exact division between 
East and West. 

Up to that point — it is a fringe of palms, stiff 
against the sky — the impetus of home memories and 
the echo of home interests carry the young man along 
very comfortably on his first journey. But at Suez 
one must face things. People, generally the most 
sympathetic, leave the boat there; the older men 
who are going on have discovered each other and 
begun to talk shop; no newspapers come aboard, 
only clipped Reuter telegrams; the world seems 
cruelly large and self-absorbed. One goes for a walk 
and finds this little bit of kept ground, with comfort- 
able garden-gated houses on either side of the path. 
Then one begins to wonder, in the twilight, for choice, 
when one will see those palms again from the other 
side. Then the black hour of homesickness, vain 
regrets, foolish promises, and weak despair shuts 
down with the smell of strange earth and the ca- 
dence of strange tongues. 

Cross-roads and halting-places in the desert are 
always favoured by djinns and afrits. The young 
man will find them waiting for him in the Canal 
Company's garden at Port Said. 



A RETURN TO THE EAST 237 

On the other hand, if he is fortunate enough to have 
won the East by inheritance, as there are families who 
served her for five or six generations, he will meet 
no ghouls in that garden, but a free and a friendly 
and an ample welcome from good spirits of the East 
that awaits him. The voices of the gardeners and the 
watchmen will be as the greetings of his father's 
servants in his father's house; the evening smells 
and the sight of the hibiscus and poinsettia will un- 
lock his tongue in words and sentences that he thought 
he had clean forgotten, and he will go back to the 
ship (I have seen) as a prince entering on his kingdom. 

There was a man in our company — a young 
Englishman — who had just been granted his heart's 
desire in the shape of some raw district south of 
everything southerly in the Sudan, where, on two- 
thirds of a member of Parliament's wage, under 
conditions of life that would horrify a self-respecting 
operative, he will see perhaps some dozen white men 
in a year, and will certainly pick up two sorts of 
fever. He had been moved to work very hard for 
this billet by the representations of a friend in the 
same service, who said that it was a "rather decent 
sort of service," and he was all of a heat to reach 
Khartum, report for duty, and fall to. If he is 
lucky, he may get a district where the people are so 
virtuous that they do not know how to wear any 
clothes at all, and so ignorant that they have never 
yet come across strong drink. 



238 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

The train that took us to Cairo was own sister in 
looks and fittings to any South African train — for 
which I loved her — but she was a trial to some 
citizens of the United States, who, being used to the 
Pullman, did not understand the side-corridored, 
solid-compartment idea. The trouble with a 
standardised democracy seems to be that, once they 
break loose from their standards, they have no props* 
People are not left behind and luggage is rarely 
mislaid on the railroads of the older world. There is 
an ordained ritual for the handling of all things, to 
which if a man will only conform and keep quiet, he 
and his will be attended to with the rest. The 
people that I watched would not believe this. They 
charged about futilely and wasted themselves in 
trying to get ahead of their neighbours. 

Here is a fragment from the restaurant-car: 

"Look at here! Me and some friends of mine are 
going to dine at this table. We don't want to be 
separated and " 

"You 'ave your number for the service, sar?" 

"Number? What number? We want to dine 
here> I tell you." 

"You shall get your number, sar, for the first 
service ? " 

"How's that? Where in thunder do we get the 
numbers, anyway?" 

"I will give you the number, sar, at the time — for 
places at the first service/ 5 



A RETURN TO THE EAST 239 

"Yes, but we want to dine together here — right now" 

"The service is not yet ready, sar." 

And so on — and so on; with marchings and 
countermarchings, and every word nervously 
italicised. In the end they dined precisely where 
there was room for them in that new world which 
they had strayed into. 

On one side our windows looked out on darkness 
of the waste; on the other at the black canal, all 
spaced with monstrous headlights of the night- 
running steamers. Then came towns, lighted with 
electricity, governed by mixed commissions, and 
dealing in cotton. Such a town, for instance, as 
Zagazig, last seen by a very small boy who was 
lifted out of a railway-carriage and set down beneath 
a whitewashed wall under naked stars in an illimit- 
able emptiness because, they told him, the train was 
on fire. Childlike, this did not worry him. What 
stuck in his sleepy mind was the absurd name of the 
place and his father's prophecy that when he grew 
up he would "come that way in a big steamer/* 

So all his life, the word "Zagazig" carried mem- 
ories of a brick shed, the flicker of an oil-lamp's 
floating wick, a sky full of eyes, and an engine 
coughing in a desert at the world's end; which 
memories returned in a restaurant-car jolting through 
what seemed to be miles of brilliantly lighted streets 
and factories. No one at the table had even turned 
his head for the battlefields of Kassassin and Tel-el- 



2 4 o EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

Kebir. After all, why should they? That work is 
done, and children are getting ready to be born who 
will say: "/ can remember Gondokoro (or El-Obeid 
or some undreamed of Clapham Junction, Abyssinia- 
way) before a single factory was started, before the 
overhead traffic began. Yes, when there was a 
fever — actually fever — in the city itself!" 

The gap is no greater than that between to-day's 
and t'other day's Zagazig — between the horsed vans 
of the Overland Route in Lieutenant Waghorn's 
time and the shining motor that flashed us to our 
Cairo hotel through what looked like the suburbs 
of Marseilles or Rome. 

Always keep a new city till morning. "In the 
daytime," as it is written in the Perspicuous Book, 1 
"thou hast long occupation." Our window gave on to 
the river, but before one moved towards it one heard 
the thrilling squeal of the kites — those same thievish 
companions of the road who, at that hour, were 
watching every Englishman's breakfast in every 
compound and camp from Cairo to Calcutta. 

Voices rose from below — unintelligible words in 
maddeningly familiar accents. A black boy in one 
blue garment climbed, using his toes as fingers, the 
tipped mainyard of a Nile boat and framed himself 
in the window. Then, because he felt happy, he 
sang, all among the wheeling kites. And beneath 

x The Koran. 



A RETURN TO THE EAST 241 

our balcony rolled very Nile Himself, golden in sun- 
shine, wrinkled under strong breezes, with a crowd of 
creaking cargo-boats waiting for a bridge to be 
opened. 

On the cut-stone quay above, a line of cab drivers 
— a ticca-gharri stand, nothing less — lolled and 
chaffed and tinkered with their harnesses in every 
beautiful attitude of the ungirt East. All the 
ground about was spotted with chewed sugar-cane- 
first sign of the hot weather all the world over. 

Troops with startlingly pink faces (one would not 
have noticed this yesterday) rolled over the girder 
bridge between churning motors and bubbling 
camels, and the w^hole long-coated loose-sleeved 
Moslem world was awake and about its business, as 
befits sensible people who pray at dawn. 

I made haste to cross the bridge and to hear the 
palms in the wind on the far side. They sang as 
nobly as though they had been true coconuts, and 
the thrust of the north wind behind them was almost 
as open-handed as the thrust of the Trades. Then 
came a funeral — the sheeted corpse in the shallow 
cot, the brisk-pacing bearers (if he was good, the 
sooner he is buried the sooner in heaven; if bad, bury 
him swiftly for the sake of the household — either 
way, as the Prophet says, do not let the mourners go 
too long weeping and hungry) — the women behind,' 
tossing their arms and lamenting, and men and boys 
chanting low and high. 



/ 



242 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

They might have come forth from the Taksali 
Gate the city of Lahore on just such a cold weather 
morning as this, on their way to the Mohammedan 
burial-grounds by the river. And the veiled coun- 
trywomen, shuffling side by side, elbow pressed to 
hip, and eloquent right hand pivoting round, palm 
uppermost, to give value to each shrill phrase, might 
have been the wives of so many Punjabi cultivators 
but that they wore another type of bangle and 
slipper. A knotty-kneed youth sitting high on a 
donkey, both amuleted against the evil eye, chewed 
three purplish feet of sugar-cane, which made one 
envious as well as voluptuously homesick, though 
the sugar-cane of Egypt is not to be compared with 
that of Bombay. 

Hans Breitmann writes somewhere: 

Oh, if you live in Leyden town 

You'll meet, if troot be told, 
Der forms of all der freunds dot tied 

When du werst six years old. 

And they were all there under the chanting 
palms — saices, orderlies, pedlars, water-carriers, 
street-cleaners, chicken-sellers and the slate-coloured 
buffalo with the china-blue eyes being talked to by a 
little girl with the big stick. Behind the hedges 
of well-kept gardens squatted the brown gardener, 
making trenches indifferently with a hoe or a toe, and 
under the municipal lamp-post lounged the bronze 
policeman — a touch of Arab about mouth and lean 



A RETURN TO THE EAST 243 

nostril — quite unconcerned with a ferocious row 
between two donkey-men. They were fighting 
across the body of a Nubian who had chosen to 
sleep in that place. Presently, one of them stepped 
back on the sleeper's stomach. The Nubian grunted, 
elbowed himself up, rolled his eyes, and pronounced 
a few utterly dispassionate words. The warriors 
stopped, settled their headgear, and went away as 
quickly as the Nubian went to sleep again. This 
was life, the real, unpolluted stuff — worth a desert- 
full of mummies. And right through the middle of 
it — hooting and kicking up the Nile — passed a 
Cook's steamer all ready to take tourists to Assuan. 
From the Nubian's point of view she, and not 
himself, was the wonder — as great as the Swiss- 
controlled, Swiss-staffed hotel behind her, whose 
lift, maybe, the Nubian helped to run. Marids 
and afrits, guardians of hidden gold, who choke 
or crush the rash seeker; encounters with the long- 
buried dead in a Cairo back alley; undreamed-of 
promotions, and suddenly lit loves are the stuff of 
any respectable person's daily life; but the white 
man from across the water, arriving in hundreds with 
his unveiled women folk, who builds himself flying- 
rooms and talks along wires, who flees up and down 
the river, mad to sit up on camels and asses, con- 
strained to throw down silver from both hands, at 
once a child and a warlock — this thing must come to 
the Nubian sheer out of the Thousand and One 



244 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

Nights. At any rate, the Nubian was perfectly sane. 
Having eaten, he slept in God's own sunlight, and 
I left him, to visit the fortunate and guarded and 
desirable city of Cairo, to whose people, male and 
female, Allah has given subtlety in abundance. 
Their jesters are known to have surpassed in re- 
finement the jesters of Damascus, as did their twelve 
police captains the hardiest and most corrupt of 
Bagdad in the tolerant days of Harun-al-Raschid; 
while their old women, not to mention their young 
wives, could deceive the Father of Lies himself. 
Delhi is a great place — most bazaar storytellers in 
India make their villain hail from there; but when 
the agony and intrigue are piled highest and the tale 
halts till the very last breathless sprinkle of cowries 
has ceased to fall on his mat, why then, with wagging 
head and hooked forefinger, the storyteller goes on: 
"But there was a man from Cairo, an Egyptian 
of the Egyptians, who" — and all the crowd knows 
that a bit of real metropolitan devilry is coming. 



Ill 

A Serpent of Old Nile 

Modern Cairo is an unkempt place. The streets 
are dirty and ill constructed, the pavements unswept 
and often broken, the tramways thrown, rather than 
laid, down, the gutters neglected. One expects 
better than this in a city where the tourist spends so 
much every season. Granted that the tourist is a 
dog, he comes at least with a bone in his mouth, and 
a bone that many people pick. He should have a 
cleaner kennel. The official answer is that the 
tourist-traffic is a flea-bite compared with the cotton 
industry. Even so, land in Cairo city must be too 
valuable to be used for cotton growing. It might 
just as well be paved or swept. There is some sort 
of authority supposed to be in charge of municipal 
matters, but its work is crippled by what is called 
"The Capitulations." It was told to me that every 
one in Cairo except the English, who appear to be 
the mean whites of these parts, has the privilege of 
appealing to his counsel on every conceivable sub- 
ject from the disposal of a garbage-can to that of a 
corpse. As almost every one with claims to respect- 
ability, and certainly every one without any, keeps 

245 



246 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

a consul, it follows that there is one consul per super- 
ficial meter, arshin, or cubit of Ezekiel within the 
city. And since every consul is zealous for the hon- 
our of his country and not at all above annoying the 
English on general principles, municipal progress is 
slow. 

Cairo strikes one as unventilated and unsterilised, 
even when the sun and wind are scouring it together. 
The tourist talks a good deal, as you may see here, 
but the permanent European resident does not open 
his mouth more than is necessary — sound travels so 
far across flat water. Besides, the whole position of 
things, politically and administratively, is essen- 
tially false. 

Here is a country which is not a country but a 
longish strip of market-garden, nominally in charge 
of a government which is not a government but the 
disconnected satrapy of a half-dead empire, con- 
trolled pecksniffingly by a Power which is not a 
Power but an Agency, which Agency has been tied 
up by years, custom, and blackmail in all sorts of 
intimate relations with six or seven European powers, 
all with rights and perquisites, none of whose sub- 
jects seem directly amenable to any power which at 
first, second, or third hand is supposed to be respon- 
sible. That is the barest outline. To fill in the 
details (if any living man knows them) would be as 
easy as to explain baseball to an Englishman or the 
Eton Wall game to a citizen of the United States. 



A SERPENT OF OLD NILE 247 

But it is a fascinating play. There are Frenchmen 
in it, whose logical mind it offends, and they revenge 
themselves by printing the finance-reports and the 
catalogue of the Bulak Museum in pure French. 
There are Germans in it, whose demands must be 
carefully weighed — not that they can by any means 
be satisfied, but they serve to block other people's. 
There are Russians in it, who do not very much 
matter at present but will be heard from later. 
There are Italians and Greeks in it (both rather 
pleased with themselves just now), full of the higher 
finance and the finer emotions. There are Egyp- 
tian pashas in it, who come back from Paris at inter- 
vals and ask plaintively to whom they are supposed 
to belong. There is His Highness, the Khedive, in 
it, and he must be considered not a little, and there 
are women in it, up to their eyes. And there are 
great English cotton and sugar interests, and angry 
English importers clamouring to know why they 
cannot do business on rational lines or get into the 
Sudan, which they hold is ripe for development if 
the administration there would only see reason. 
Among these conflicting interests and amusements 
sits and perspires the English official, whose job is 
irrigating or draining or reclaiming land on behalf 
of a trifle of ten million people, and he finds himself 
tripped up by skeins of intrigue and bafflement 
which may ramify through half a dozen harems and 
four consulates. All this makes for suavity, tolera- 



248 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

tion, and the blessed habit of not being surprised at 
anything whatever. 

Or, so it seemed to me, watching a big dance at 
one of the hotels. Every European race and breed 
and half of the United States were represented, but I 
fancied I could make out three distinct groupings. 
The tourists with the steamer-trunk creases still 
across their dear, excited backs; the military and the 
officials sure of their partners beforehand, and saying 
clearly what ought to be said, and a third contingent, 
lower- voiced, softer-footed, and keener eyed than the 
other two, at ease, as gipsies are on their own ground, 
flinging half-words in local argot over shoulders at 
their friends, understanding on the nod and moved 
by springs common to their clan only. For example, 
a woman was talking flawless English to her partner, 
an English officer. Just before the next dance began, 
another woman beckoned to her, Eastern fashion, 
all four fingers flicking downward. The first woman 
crossed to a potted palm; the second moved towards 
it, also, till the two drew up, not looking at each 
other, the plant between them. Then she who had 
beckoned spoke in a strange tongue at the palm. 
The first woman, still looking away, answered in the 
same fashion with a rush of words that rattled like 
buckshot through the stiff fronds. Her tone had 
nothing to do with that in which she greeted her 
new partner, who came up as the music began. The 
one was a delicious drawl; the other had been the gut- 



A SERPENT OF OLD NILE 249 

tural rasp and click of the kitchen and the bazaar. 
So she moved off, and, in a little, the second woman 
disappeared into the crowd. Most likely it was no 
more than some question of the programme or dress, 
but the prompt, feline stealth and coolness of it, 
the lightning-quick return to and from world-apart 
civilisations stuck in my memory. 

So did the bloodless face of a very old Turk, fresh 
from some horror of assassination in Constantinople 
in which he, too, had been nearly pistolled, but, they 
said, he had argued quietly over the body of a late 
colleague, as one to whom death was of no moment, 
until the hysterical Young Turks were abashed and 
let him get away — -to the lights and music of this ele- 
gantly appointed hotel. 

These modern "Arabian Nights 5 ' are too hectic 
for quiet folk. I declined upon a more rational 
Cairo — the Arab city where everything is as it was 
when Maruf the Cobbler fled from Fatima-el-Orra 
and met the djinn in the Adelia Musjid. The 
craftsmen and merchants sat on their shopboards, 
a rich mystery of darkness behind them, and the 
narrow gullies were polished to shoulder-height by 
the mere flux of people. Shod white men, unless 
they are agriculturists, touch lightly, with their 
hands at most, in passing. Easterns lean and loll 
and squat and sidle against things as they daunder 
along. When the feet are bare, the whole body 
thinks. Moreover, it is unseemly to buy or to do 



250 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

aught and be done with it. Only people with tight- 
fitting clothes that need no attention have time for 
that. So we of the loose skirt and flowing trousers 
and slack slipper make full and ample salutations to 
our friends, and redouble them toward our ill-wishers, 
and if it be a question of purchase, the stuff must 
be fingered and appraised with a proverb or so, 
and if it be a fool tourist who thinks that he cannot 
be cheated, O true believers! draw near and witness 
how we shall loot him. 

But I bought nothing. The City thrust more 
treasure upon me than I could carry away. It 
came out of dark alleyways on tawny camels loaded 
with pots; on pattering asses half buried under nets 
of cut clover; in the exquisitely modelled hands of 
little children scurrying home from the cookshop 
with the evening meal, chin pressed against the 
platter's edge and eyes round with responsibility 
above the pile; in the broken lights from jutting 
rooms overhead, where the women lie, chin between 
palms, looking out of windows not a foot from the 
floor; in every glimpse into every courtyard, where 
the men smoke by the tank; in the heaps of rubbish 
and rotten bricks that flanked newly painted houses, 
waiting to be built, some day, into houses once more; 
in the slap and slide of the heelless red-and-yellow 
slippers all around, and, above all, in the mixed 
delicious smells of frying butter, Mohammedan 
bread, kalabs, leather, cooking-smoke, asafetida, 



A SERPENT OF OLD NILE 251 

peppers, and turmeric. Devils cannot abide the smell 
of burning turmeric, but the right-minded man loves 
it. It stands for evening that brings all home, 
the evening meal, the dipping of friendly hands in 
the dish, the one face, the dropped veil, and the big, 
guttering pipe afterward. 

Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures 
and for the five advantages of travel and for the 
glories of the cities of the earth ! Harun-al-Raschid, 
in roaring Bagdad of old, never delighted himself to 
the limits of such a delight as was mine, that after- 
noon. It is true that the call to prayer, the cadence 
of some of the street-cries, and the cut of some of 
the garments differed a little from what I had been 
brought up to; but for the rest, the shadow on the 
dial had turned back twenty degrees for me, and I 
found myself saying, as perhaps the dead say when 
they have recovered their wits, "This is my real world 
again. " 

Some men are Mohammedan by birth, some by 
training, and some by fate, but I have never met an 
Englishman yet who hated Islam and its people as 
I have met Englishmen who hated some other faiths. 
Musalmani awadani, as the saying goes — where there 
are Mohammedans, there is a comprehensible civili- 
sation. 

Then we came upon a deserted mosque of pitted 
brick colonnades round a vast courtyard open to the 
pale sky. It was utterly empty except for its own 



252 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

proper spirit, and that caught one by the throat 
as one entered. Christian churches may compromise 
with images and side-chapels, where the unworthy or 
abashed can traffic with accessible saints. Islam 
has but one pulpit and one stark affirmation — living 
or dying, one only — and where men have repeated 
that in red-hot belief through centuries, the air still 
shakes to it. 

Some say now that Islam is dying and that no- 
body cares; others that, if she withers in Europe and 
Asia, she will renew herself in Africa and will return 
— terrible — after certain years, at the head of all 
the nine sons of Ham; others dream that the English 
understand Islam as no one else does, and, in years 
to be, Islam will admit this and the world will be 
changed. If you go to the mosque Al Azhar — the 
thousand-year-old University of Cairo — you will 
be able to decide for yourself. There is nothing to 
see except many courts, cool in hot weather, sur- 
rounded by cliff-like brick walls. Men come and 
go through dark doorways, giving on to yet darker 
cloisters, as freely as though the place was a bazaar. 
There are no aggressive educational appliances. 
The students sit on the ground, and their teachers 
instruct them, mostly by word of mouth, in grammar, 
syntax, logic; al-hisab, which is arithmetic; al-jah'r 
w'al muqabalah, which is algebra; at-tafsir, commen- 
taries on the Koran; and, last and most troublesome, 
al-ahadis, traditions, and yet more commentaries 



A SERPENT OF OLD NILE 253 

on the law of Islam, which leads back, like every- 
thing, to the Koran once again. (For it is written, 
'Truly the Quran is none other than a revelation. ") 
It is a very comprehensive curriculum. No man 
can master it entirely, but any can stay there as 
long as he pleases. The university provides com- 
mons — twenty-five thousand loaves a day, I believe, 
and there is always a place to lie down in for such as 
do not desire a shut room and a bed. Nothing could 
be more simple or, given certain conditions, more 
effective. Close upon six hundred professors who 
represent officially or unofficially every school of 
thought, teach ten or twelve thousand students, who 
draw from every Mohammedan community, west 
and east between Manila and Morocco, north and 
south between Kamchatka and the Malay mosque 
at Cape Town. These drift off to become teachers 
of little schools, preachers at mosques, students of 
the Law known to millions (but rarely to Europeans), 
dreamers, devotees, or miracle-workers in all the 
ends of the earth. The man who interested me most 
was a red-bearded, sunk-eyed mullah from the In- 
dian frontier, not likely to be last at any distribution 
of food, who stood up like a lean wolf-hound among 
collies in a little assembly at a doorway. 

And there was another mosque, sumptuously 
carpeted and lighted (which the Prophet did not 
approve of), where men prayed in the dull mutter 
that, at times, mounts and increases under the 



254 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

domes like the boom of drums or the surge of a 
hot hive before the swarm flings out. And round 
the corner of it, one almost ran into Our inconspicu- 
ous and wholly detached Private of Infantry, his 
tunic open, his cigarette alight, leaning against 
some railings and considering the city below. Men 
in forts and citadels and garrisons all the world over 
go up at twilight as automatically as sheep at sun- 
down, to have a last look round. They say little 
and return as silently across the crunching gravel, 
detested by bare feet, to their whitewashed rooms 
and regulated lives. One of the men told me he 
thought well of Cairo. It was interesting. "Take 
it from me," he said, "there's a lot in seeing places, 
because you can remember 'em afterward." 

He was very right. The purple and lemon- 
coloured hazes of dusk and reflected day spread over 
the throbbing, twinkling streets, masked the great 
outline of the citadel and the desert hills, and con- 
spired to confuse and suggest and evoke memories till 
Cairo the Sorceress cast her proper shape and danced 
before me in the heart-breaking likeness of every city 
I had known and loved, a little farther up the road. 

It was a cruel double-magic. For in the very 
hour that my homesick soul had surrendered itself 
to the dream of the shadow that had turned back 
on the dial, I realised all the desolate days and 
homesickness of all the men penned in far-off places 
among strange sounds and smells. 



IV 
Up the River 

Once upon a time there was a murderer who got 
off with a life-sentence. What impressed him 
most, when he had time to think, was the frank 
boredom of all who took part in the ritual. 

"It was just like going to a doctor or a dentist/' 
he explained. " You come to 'em very full of 
your affairs, and then you discover that it's only 
part of their daily work to them. I expect," he 
added, "I should have found it the same if — er — 
I'd gone on to the finish." 

He would have. Break into any new Hell or 
Heaven and you will be met at its well-worn thres- 
hold by the bored experts in attendance. 

For three weeks we sat on copiously chaired and 
carpeted decks, carefully isolated from everything 
that had anything to do with Egypt, under chape- 
ronage of a properly orientalised dragoman. Twice 
or thrice daily, our steamer drew up at a mud-bank 
covered with donkeys. Saddles were hauled out of 
a hatch in our bows; the donkeys were dressed, dealt 
round like cards; we rode off through crops or desert, 
as the case might be, were introduced in ringing tones 

255 



256 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

to a temple, and were then duly returned to our 
bridge and our Baedekers. For sheer comfort, not 
to say padded sloth, the life was unequalled, and since 
the bulk of our passengers were citizens of the 
United States — Egypt in winter ought to be admitted 
into the Union as a temporary territory — there was 
no lack of interest. They were overwhelmingly 
women, with here and there a placid nose-led hus- 
band or father, visibly suffering from congestion of 
information about his native city. I had the joy 
of seeing two such men meet. They turned their 
backs resolutely on the River, bit and lit cigars, and 
for one hour and a quarter ceased not to emit statis- 
tics of the industries, commerce, manufacture, trans- 
port, and journalism of their towns — Los Angeles, 
let us say, and Rochester, N. Y. It sounded like 
war between two cash-registers. 

One forgot, of course, that all the dreary figures 
were alive to them, and as Los Angeles spoke Roch- 
ester visualised. Next day I met an Englishman 
from the Soudan end of things, very full of a little- 
known railway which had been laid down in what 
looked like raw desert, and therefore had turned out 
to be full of paying freight. He was in the full-tide 
of it when Los Angeles ranged alongside and cast 
anchor, fascinated by the mere roll of numbers. 

"How's that?" he cut in sharply at a pause. 

He was told how, and went on to drain my friend 
dry concerning that railroad, out of sheer fraternal 



UP THE RIVER 257 

interest, as he explained, in "any darn thing that's 
being made anywheres." 

"So you see," my friend went on, "we shall be 
bringing Abyssinian cattle into Cairo." 

"On the hoof?" One quick glance at the Desert 
ranges. 

"No, no! By rail and River. And after that 
we're going to grow cotton between the Blue and the 
White Nile and knock spots out of the States." 

"Ha-ow'sthat?" 

"This way." The speaker spread his first and 
second fingers fanwise under the big, interested 
beak. "That's the Blue Nile. And that's the 
White. There's a difference of so many feet be- 
tween 'em, an' in that fork here, 'tween my fingers, 
we shall " 

"/ see. Irrigate on the strength of the little 
difference in the levels. How many acres?" 

Again Los Angeles was told. He expanded like a 
frog in a shower. "An' I thought," he murmured, 
"Egypt was all mummies and the Bible! / used to 
know something about cotton. Now we'll talk." 

All that day the two paced the deck with the ab- 
sorbed insolence of lovers; and, lover-like, each would 
steal away and tell me what a splendid soul was his 
companion. 

That was one type; but there were others — pro- 
fessional men who did not make or sell things — and 
these the hand of an all-exacting Democracy seemed 



258 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

to have run into one mould. They were not reticent, 
but no matter whence they hailed, their talk was as 
standardised as the fittings of a Pullman. 

I hinted something of this to a woman aboard 
who was learned in the sermons of either language. 

"I think," she began, "that the staleness you com- 
plain of " 

"I never said c staleness/" I protested. 

"But you thought it. The staleness you noticed 
is due to our men being so largely educated by old 
women — old maids. Practically till he goes to Col- 
lege, and not always then, a boy can't get away from 
them." 

"Then what happens?" 

"The natural result. A man's instinct is to teach 
a boy to think for himself. If a woman can't make a 
boy think as she thinks, she sits down and cries. A 
man hasn't any standards. He makes 'em. A 
woman's the most standardized being in the world. 
She has to be. Now d'you see?" 

"Not yet." 

"Well, our trouble in America is that we're being 
school-marmed to death. You can see it in any 
paper you pick up. What were those men talking 
about just now?" 

"Food adulteration, police-reform, and beautify- 
ing waste-lots in towns," I replied promptly. 

She threw up her hands. "I knew it!" she cried. 
"Our great National Policy of co-educational house- 



UP THE RIVER 259 

keeping! Ham-frills and pillow-shams. Did you 
ever know a man get a woman's respect by parading 
around creation with a dish-clout pinned to his coat- 
tails?" 

"But if his woman ord — told him to do it?" I 
suggested. 

"Then she'd despise him the more for doing it. 
You needn't laugh. You're coming to the same sort 
of thing in England." 

I returned to the little gathering. A woman was 
talking to them as one accustomed to talk from 
birth. They listened with the rigid attention of 
men early trained to listen to, but not to talk with, 
women. She was, to put it mildly, the mother of 
all she-bores, but when she moved on, no man ven- 
tured to say as much. 

' That's what I mean by being school-marmed to 
death," said my acquaintance wickedly. "Why, 
she bored 'em stiff; but they are so well brought up, 
they didn't even know they were bored. Some day 
the American Man is going to revolt." 

"And what'll the American Woman do?" 

"She'll sit and cry — and it'll do her good." 

Later on, I met a woman from a certain Western 
State seeing God's great, happy, inattentive world for 
the first time, and rather distressed that it was not 
like hers. She had always understood that the 
English were brutal to their wives — the papers of 
her State said so. (If you only knew the papers of 



2 6o EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

her State!) But she had not noticed any scandal- 
ous treatment so far, and Englishwomen, whom she 
admitted she would never understand, seemed to 
enjoy a certain specious liberty and equality; while 
Englishmen were distinctly kind to girls in difficulties 
over their baggage and tickets on strange railways. 
Quite a nice people, she concluded, but without 
much sense of humour. One day, she showed me 
what looked like a fashion-paper print of a dress- 
stuff — a pretty oval medallion of stars on a striped 
grenadine background that somehow seemed familiar. 

"How nice! What is it?" I asked. 

"Our National Flag," she replied. 

"Indeed. But it doesn't look quite " 

"No. This is a new design for arranging the 
stars so that they shall be easier to count and more 
decorative in effect. We're going to take a vote on 
it in our State, where we have the franchise. I shall 
cast my vote when I get home." 

"Really! And how will you vote?" 

"I'm just thinking that out." She spread the 
picture on her knee and considered it, head to one 
side, as though it were indeed dress material. 

All this while the land of Egypt marched solemnly 
beside us on either hand. The river being low, we 
saw it from the boat as one long plinth, twelve to 
twenty feet high of brownish, purplish mud, visibly 
upheld every hundred yards or so by glistening 
copper caryatides in the shape of naked men baling 



UP THE RIVER 261 

water up to the crops above. Behind that bright 
emerald line ran the fawn- or tiger-coloured back- 
ground of desert, and a pale blue sky closed all. 
There was Egypt even as the Pharaohs, their en- 
gineers and architects, had seen it — land to cultivate, 
folk and cattle for the work, and outside that work no 
distraction nor allurement of any kind whatever, 
save when the dead were taken to their place beyond 
the limits of cultivation. When the banks grew 
lower, one looked across as much as two miles of 
green-stuff packed like a toy Noah's-ark with people, 
camels, goats, oxen, buffaloes, and an occasional 
horse. The beasts stood as still, too, as the toys, be- 
cause they were tethered or hobbled each to his own 
half-circle of clover, and moved forward when that 
was eaten. Only the very little kids were loose, and 
these played on the flat mud roofs like kittens. 

No wonder "every shepherd is an abomination to 
the Egyptians/' The dusty, naked-footed field- 
tracks are cut down to the last centimetre of grudged 
width; the main roads are lifted high on the flanks 
of the canals, unless the permanent-way of some 
light railroad can be pressed to do duty for them. 
The wheat, the pale ripened tufted sugar-cane, the 
millet, the barley, the onions, the fringed castor-oil 
bushes jostle each other for foothold, since the 
Desert will not give them room; and men chase the 
falling Nile inch by inch, each dawn, with new 
furrowed melon-beds on still dripping mud-banks. 



262 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

Administratively, such a land ought to be a joy. 
The people do not emigrate; all their resources are 
in plain sight; they are as accustomed as their cattle 
to being led about. All they desire, and it has been 
given them, is freedom from murder and mutilation, 
rape and robbery. The rest they can attend to in 
their silent palm-shaded villages where the pigeons 
coo and the little children play in the dust. 

But Western civilisation is a devastating and a 
selfish game. Like the young woman from "our 
State/' it says in effect: "I am rich. Fve nothing 
to do. I must do something. I shall take up social 
reform." 

Just now there is a little social reform in Egypt 
which is rather amusing. The Egyptian cultivator 
borrows money; as all farmers must. This land 
without hedge or wild-flower is his passion by age- 
long inheritance and suffering, by, in and for which 
he lives. He borrows to develop it and to buy more 
at from £30 to £200 per acre, the profit on which, when 
all is paid, works out at between £5 to £10 per acre. 
Formerly, he borrowed from the local money-lenders, 
mostly Greeks, at 30 per cent per annum and over. 
This rate is not excessive, so long as public opinion 
allows the borrower from time to time to slay the 
lender; but modern administration calls that riot 
and murder. Some years ago, therefore, there was 
established a State-guaranteed Bank which lent to 
the cultivators at eight per cent, and the cultivator 



UP THE RIVER 263 

zealously availed himself of that privilege. He 
did not default more than in reason, but being a 
farmer, he naturally did not pay up till threatened 
with being sold up. So he prospered and bought 
more land, which was his heart's desire. This 
year — 1913 — the administration issued sudden orders 
that no man owning less than five acres could borrow 
on security of his land. The matter interested me 
directly, because I held five hundred pounds worth of 
shares in that State-guaranteed Bank, and more 
than half our clients were small men of less than five 
acres. So I made inquiries in quarters that seemed 
to possess information, and was told that the new 
law was precisely on all-fours with the Homestead 
Act of the United States and France, and the in- 
tentions of Divine Providence — or words to that 
effect. 

"But," I asked, "won't this limitation of credit 
prevent the men with less than five acres from 
borrowing more to buy more land and getting on in 
the world?" 

'Yes," was the answer, "of course it will. That's 
just what we want to prevent. Half these fellows 
ruin themselves trying to buy more land. We've 
got to protect them against themselves." 

That, alas! is the one enemy against which no law 
can protect any son of Adam; since the real reasons 
that make or break a man are too absurd or too 
obscene to be reached from outside. Then I cast 






264 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

about in other quarters to discover what the culti- 
vator was going to do about it. 

Oh, him?" said one of my many informants. 
He 9 s all right. There are about six ways of 
evading the Act that I know of. The fellah probably 
knows another six. He has been trained to look 
after himself since the days of Rameses. He can 
forge land-transfers for one thing; borrow land 
enough to make his holding more than five acres for 
as long as it takes to register a loan; get money from 
his own women (yes, that's one result of modern 
progress in this land !) or go back to his old friend the 
Greek at 30 per cent." 

"Then the Greek will sell him up, and that will be 
against the law, won't it?" I said. 

"Don't you worry about the Greek. He can get 
through any law ever made if there's five piastres on 
the other side of it." 

"Maybe; but was the Agricultural Bank selling 
the cultivators up too much?" 

"Not in the least. The number of small holdings 
is on the increase, if anything. Most cultivators 
won't pay a loan until you point a judgment- 
summons at their head. They think that shows 
they're men of consequence. This swells the number 
of judgment-summons issued, but it doesn't mean 
a land-sale for each summons. Another fact is 
that in real life some men don't get on as well as 
others. Either they don't farm well enough, or 



UP THE RIVER 265 

they take to hashish, or go crazy about a girl and 
borrow money for her, or — er — something of that 
kind, and they are sold up. You may have noticed 
that." 

"I have. And meantime, what is the fellah 
doing?" 

"Meantime, the fellah has misread the Act — as 
usual. He thinks it's retrospective, and that he 
needn't pay past debts. They may make trouble, 
but I fancy your Bank will keep quiet." 

"Keep quiet! With the bottom knocked out of 
two-thirds of its business and — and my five hundred 
pounds involved!" 

"Is that your trouble? I don't think your shares 
will rise in a hurry; but if you want some fun, go and 
talk to the French about it." 

This seemed as good a way as any of getting a 
little interest. The Frenchman that I went to 
spoke with a certain knowledge of finance and 
politics and the natural malice of a logical race 
against an illogical horde. 

"Yes," he said. "The idea of limiting credit 
under these circumstances is absurd. But that is 
not all. People are not frightened, business is not 
upset by one absurd idea, but by the possibilities of 



more." 



"Are there any more ideas, then, that are going to 
be tried on this country?" 

'Two or three," he replied placidly. "They are 



266 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

all generous; but they are all ridiculous. Egypt is 
not a place where one should promulgate ridiculous 
ideas." 

"But my shares — my shares!" I cried. "They 
have already dropped several points." 

"It is possible. They will drop more. Then 
they will rise." 

"Thank you. But why ? " 

"Because the idea is fundamentally absurd. 
That will never be admitted by your people, but 
there will be arrangements, accommodations, ad- 
justments, till it is all the same as it used to be. It 
will be the concern of the Permanent Official — poor 
devil! — to pull it straight. It is always his concern. 
Meantime, prices will rise for all things." 

"Why?" 

"Because the land is the chief security in Egypt. 
If a man cannot borrow on that security, the rates 
of interest will increase on whatever other security 
he offers. That will affect all work and wages and 
Government contracts." 

He put it so convincingly and with so many 
historical illustrations that I saw whole perspectives 
of the old energetic Pharaohs, masters of life and 
death along the River, checked in mid-career by 
cold-blooded accountants chanting that not even 
the Gods themselves can make two plus two more 
than four. And the vision ran down through the 
ages to one little earnest head on a Cook's steamer, 



UP THE RIVER 267 

bent sideways over the vital problem of rearranging 
"our National Flag" so that it should be "easier to 
count the stars." 

For the thousandth time: Praised be Allah for 
the diversity of His creatures! 



V 
Dead Kings 

The Swiss are the only people who have taken the 
trouble to master the art of hotel-keeping. Con- 
sequently, in the things that really matter — beds, 
baths, and victuals — they control Egypt; and since 
every land always throws back to its aboriginal life 
(which is why the United States delight in telling 
aged stories), any ancient Egyptian would at once 
understand and join in with the life that roars 
through the nickel-plumbed tourist-barracks on the 
river, where all the world frolics in the sunshine. At 
first sight, the show lends itself to cheap moralising, 
till one recalls that one only sees busy folk when they 
are idle, and rich folk when they have made their 
money. A citizen of the United States — his first 
trip abroad — pointed out a middle-aged Anglo- 
Saxon who was relaxing after the manner of several 
school-boys. 

"There's a sample!" said the Son of Hustle 
scornfully. " 'Tell me, he ever did anything in his 
life?" Unluckily he had pitched upon one who, 
when he is in collar, reckons thirteen and a half 
hours a fairish day's work. 

268 



DEAD KINGS 269 

Among this assembly were men and women 
burned to an even blue-black tint — civilised people 
with bleached hair and sparkling eyes. They 
explained themselves as "diggers" — just diggers, 
and opened me a new world. Granted that all 
Egypt is one big undertaker's emporium, what could 
be more fascinating than to get Government leave to 
rummage in a corner of it, to form a little company 
and spend the cold weather trying to pay dividends 
in the shape of amethyst necklaces, lapis lazuli 
scarabs, pots of pure gold, and priceless bits of 
statuary? Or, if one is rich, what better fun than to 
grub-stake an expedition on the supposed site of a 
dead city and see what turns up ? There was a big- 
game hunter who had used most of the Continent, 
quite carried away by this sport. 

"I'm going to take shares in a city next year, and 
watch the digging myself," he said. "It beats 
elephants to pieces. In this game you're digging up 
dead things and making them alive. Aren't you 
going to have a flutter?" 

He showed me a seductive little prospectus. 
Myself, I would sooner not lay hands on a dead 
man's kit or equipment, especially when he has gone 
to his grave in the belief that the trinkets guarantee 
salvation. Of course, there is the other argument, 
put forward by sceptics, that the Egyptian was a 
blatant self-advertiser, and that nothing would 
please him more than the thought that he was being 



2 7 o EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

looked at and admired after all these years. Still, 
one might rob some shrinking soul who didn't see it 
in that light. 

At the end of spring the diggers flock back out of 
the Desert and exchange chaff and news in the 
gorgeous verandahs. For example, A's company 
has made a find of priceless stuff, Heaven knows how 
old, and is — not too meek about it. Company B, 
less fortunate, hints that if only A knew to what 
extent their native diggers had been stealing and dis- 
posing of the thefts, under their very archaeological 
noses, they would not be so happy. 

"Nonsense/' says Company A. "Our diggers 
are above suspicion. Besides, we watched 'em/' 

"Are they?" is the reply. 

"Well, next time you are in Berlin, go to the 
Museum and you'll see what the Germans have got 
hold of. It must have come out of your ground. 
The Dynasty proves it." So A's cup is poisoned — 
till next year. No collector or curator of a museum 
should have any moral scruples whatever; and I 
have never met one who had; though I have been 
informed by deeply shocked informants of four 
nationalities that the Germans are the most flagrant 
pirates of all. 

The business of exploration is about as romantic 
as earth-work on Indian railways. There are the 
same narrow-gauge trams and donkeys, the same 
shining gangs in the borrow-pits and the same 



DEAD KINGS 271 

skirling dark-blue crowds of women and children 
with the little earth-baskets. But the hoes are not 
driven in, nor the clods jerked aside at random, and 
when the work fringes along the base of some 
mighty wall, men use their hands carefully. A 
white man — or he was white at breakfast-time — 
patrols through the continually renewed dust-haze. 
Weeks may pass without a single bead, but anything 
may turn up at any moment, and it is his to answer 
the shout of discovery. 

We had the good fortune to stay a while at the 
Headquarters of the Metropolitan Museum (New 
York) in a valley riddled like a rabbit-warren with 
tombs. Their stables, store-houses, and servants' 
quarters are old tombs; their talk is of tombs, and 
their dream (the diggers' dream always) is to dis- 
cover a virgin tomb where the untouched dead lie 
with their jewels upon them. Four miles away are 
the wide-winged, rampant hotels. Here is nothing 
whatever but the rubbish of death that died thou- 
sands of years ago, on whose grave no green thing has 
ever grown. Villages, expert in two hundred genera- 
tions of grave-robbing, cower among the mounds of 
wastage, and whoop at the daily tourist. Paths 
made by bare feet run from one half-tomb, half-mud- 
heap to the next, not much more distinct than snail 
smears, but they have been used since. . . . 

Time is a dangerous thing to play with. That 
morning the concierge had toiled for us among 



272 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

steamer-sailings to see if we could save three days. 
That evening we sat with folk for whom Time had 
stood still since the Ptolemies. I wondered, at 
first, how it concerned them or any man if such and 
such a Pharaoh had used to his own glory the plinths 
and columns of such another Pharaoh before or 
after Melchizedek. Their whole background was 
too inconceivably remote for the mind to work on. 
But the next morning we were taken to the painted 
tomb of a noble — a Minister of Agriculture — who 
died four or five thousand years ago. He said to me, 
in so many words: "Observe! I was very like 
your friend, the late Mr. Samuel Pepys, of your 
Admiralty. I took an enormous interest in life, 
which I most thoroughly enjoyed, on its human and 
on its spiritual side. I do not think you will find 
many departments of State better managed than 
mine, or a better-kept house, or a nicer set of young 
people. . . . My daughters! The eldest, as 
you can see, takes after her mother. The youngest, 
my favourite, is supposed to favour me. Now I will 
show you all the things that I did, and delighted in, 
till it was time for me to present my accounts else- 
where." And he showed me, detail by detail, in 
colour and in drawing, his cattle, his horses, his 
crops, his tours in the district, his accountants 
presenting the revenue returns, and he himself, 
busiest of the busy, in the good day. 

But when we left that broad, gay ante-room and 



DEAD KINGS 273 

came to the narrower passage where once his body 
had lain and where all his doom was portrayed, I 
could not follow him so well. I did not see how he, 
so experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of 
brute-headed apparitions or satisfied by files of re- 
peated figures. He explained, something to this effect : 
"We live on the River — a line without breadth or 
thickness. Behind us is the Desert, which nothing 
can affect; whither no man goes till he is dead. 
(One does not use good agricultural ground for 
cemeteries.) Practically, then, we only move in two 
dimensions — up stream or down. Take away the 
Desert, which we don't consider any more than a 
healthy man considers death, and you will see that 
we have no background whatever. Our world is all 
one straight bar of brown or green earth, and, for 
some months, mere sky-reflecting water that wipes 
out everything. You have only to look at the 
Colossi to realize how enormously and extravagantly 
man and his works must scale in such a country. Re- 
member, too, that our crops are sure, and our life is 
very, very easy. Above all, we have no neighbours. 
That is to say, we must give out, for we cannot take 
in. Now, I put it to you, what is left for a priest 
with imagination, except to develop ritual and 
multiply gods on friezes? Unlimited leisure, limited 
space of two dimensions, divided by the hypnotising 
line of the River, and bounded by visible, unalterable 
death — must, ipso facto " 



274 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

"Even so," I interrupted. "I do not comprehend 
your gods — your direct worship of beast, for in- 
stance?" 

"You prefer the indirect? The worship of 
Humanity with a capital H? My gods, or what I 
saw in them, contented me." 

"What did you see in your gods as affecting belief 
and conduct?" 

"You know the answer to the riddle of the 
Sphinx?" 

"No," I murmured. "What is it?" 

"'All sensible men are of the same religion, but no 
sensible man ever tells/" he replied. With that I 
had to be content, for the passage ended in solid 
rock. 

There were other tombs in the valley, but the 
owners were dumb, except one Pharaoh, who from 
the highest motives had broken with the creeds and 
instincts of his country, and so had all but wrecked 
it. One of his discoveries was an artist, who saw 
men not on one plane but modelled full or three- 
quarter face, with limbs suited to their loads and 
postures. His vividly realized stuff leaped to the eye 
out of the acreage of low-relief in the old convention, 
and I applauded as a properly brought up tourist 
should. 

"Mine was a fatal mistake," Pharaoh Ahkenaton 
sighed in my ear. "I mistook the conventions of 
life for the realities." 



DEAD KINGS 275 

"Ah, those soul-crippling conventions ! " I cried. 

"You mistake me," he answered more stiffly. "I 
was so sure of their reality that I thought that they 
were really lies, whereas they were only invented to 
cover the raw facts of life." 

"Ah, those raw facts of life!" I cried, still louder; 
for it is not often that one has a chance of impressing 
a Pharaoh. "We must face them with open eyes 
and an open mind! Did you?" 

"I had no opportunity of avoiding them," he 
replied. "I broke every convention in my land." 

"Oh, noble! And what happened?" 

"What happens when you strip the cover off a 
hornet's nest? The raw fact of life is that mankind 
is just a little lower than the angels, and the conven- 
tions are based on that fact in order that men may 
become angels. But if you begin, as I did, by the 
convention that men are angels they will assuredly 
become bigger beasts than ever." 

"That," I said firmly, "is altogether out-of-date. 
You should have brought a larger mentality, a more 
vital uplift, and — er — all that sort of thing, to bear 
on — all that sort of thing, you know." 

"I did," said Ahkenaton gloomily. "It broke 
me!" And he, too, went dumb among the ruins. 

There is a valley of rocks and stones in every 
shade of red and brown, called the Valley of the 
Kings, where a little oil-engine coughs behind its 
hand all day long, grinding electricity to light the 



276 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

faces of dead Pharaohs a hundred feet underground. 
All down the valley, during the tourist season, stand 
charabancs and donkeys and sand-carts, with here 
and there exhausted couples who have dropped out 
of the processions and glisten and fan themselves in 
some scrap of shade. Along the sides of the valley 
are the tombs of the kings, as it might be neatly 
numbered, mining adits with concrete steps leading 
up to them, and iron grilles that lock of nights, and 
doorkeepers of the Department of Antiquities 
demanding the proper tickets. One enters, and 
from deeps below deeps hears the voice of dragomans 
booming through the names and titles of the 
illustrious and thrice-puissant dead. Rock-cut steps 
go down into hot, still darkness, passages twist and 
are led over blind pits which, men say, the wise 
builders childishly hoped would be taken for the 
real tombs by thieves to come. Up and down these 
alley-ways clatter all the races of Europe with a solid 
backing of the United States. Their footsteps are 
suddenly blunted on the floor of a hall paved with 
immemorial dust that will never dance in any wind. 
They peer up at the blazoned ceilings, stoop down to 
the minutely decorated walls, crane and follow the 
sombre splendours of a cornice, draw in their breaths 
and climb up again to the fierce sunshine to redive 
into the next adit on their programme. What they 
think proper to say, they say aloud — and some of it 
is very interesting. What they feel you can guess 



DEAD KINGS 277 

from a certain haste in their movements — something 
between the shrinking modesty of a man under fire 
and the Hadn't-we-better-be-getting-on attitude of 
visitors to a mine. After all, it is not natural for 
man to go underground except for business or for the 
last time. He is conscious of the weight of mother- 
earth overhead, and when to her expectant bulk is 
added the whole beaked, horned, winged, and 
crowned hierarchy of a lost faith flaming at every 
turn of his eye, he naturally wishes to move away. 
Even the sight of a very great king indeed, sar- 
cophagused under electric light in a hall full of most 
fortifying pictures, does not hold him too long. 

Some men assert that the crypt of St. Peter's, 
with only nineteen centuries bearing down on the 
groining, and the tombs of early popes and kings all 
about, is more impressive than the Valley of the 
Kings because it explains how and out of what an 
existing creed grew. But the Valley of the Kings 
explains nothing except that most terrible line in 
Macbeth: 

To the last syllable of recorded time. 

Earth opens her dry lips and says it. 

In one of the tombs there is a little chamber whose 
ceiling, probably because of a fault in the rock, could 
not be smoothed off like the others. So the decorator, 
very cunningly, covered it with a closely designed 
cloth-pattern — just such a chintz-like piece of stuff 



278 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

as, in real life, one would use to underhang a rough 
roof with. He did it perfectly, down there in the 
dark, and went his way. Thousands of years later, 
there was born a man of my acquaintance who, for 
good and sufficient reason, had an almost insane 
horror of anything in the nature of a ceiling-cloth. 
He used to make excuses for not going into the dry 
goods shops at Christmas, when hastily enlarged 
annexes are hidden, roof and sides, with embroideries. 
Perhaps a snake or a lizard had dropped on his 
mother from the roof before he was born; perhaps it 
was the memory of some hideous fever-bout in a 
tent. At any rate, that man's idea of The Torment 
was a hot, crowded underground room, underhung 
with patterned cloths. Once in his life at a city in 
the far north, where he had to make a speech, he met 
that perfect combination. They led him up and 
down narrow, crowded, steam-heated passages, till 
they planted him at last in a room without visible 
windows (by which he knew he was underground), 
and directly beneath a warm-patterned ceiling-cloth 
— rather like a tent-lining. And there he had to say 
his say, while panic terror sat in his throat. The 
second time was in the Valley of the Kings, where 
very similar passages, crowded with people, led him 
into a room cut of rock fathoms underground, with 
what looked like a sagging chintz cloth not three feet 
above his head. 

"The man I'd like to catch/' he said when he 



DEAD KINGS 279 

came outside again, "is that decorator-man. D'you 
suppose he meant to produce that effect ?" 

Every man has his private terrors, other than 
those of his own conscience. From what I saw 
in the Valley of the Kings, the Egyptians seem 
to have known this some time ago. They certainly 
have impressed it on most unexpected people. I 
heard two voices down a passage talking t@gether as 
follows : 

She. I guess we weren't ever meant to see these 
old tombs from inside, anyway. 

He. How so ? 

She. For one thing, they believe so hard in being 
dead. Of course, their outlook on spiritual things 
wasn't as broad as ours. 

He. Well, there's no danger of our being led away 
by it. Did you buy that alleged scarab off the drag- 
oman this morning? 



VI 
The Face of the Desert 

Going up the Nile is like running the gauntlet 
before Eternity. Till one has seen it, one does 
not realise the amazing thinness of that little damp 
trickle of life that steals along undefeated through 
the jaws of established death. A rifle-shot would 
cover the widest limits of cultivation, a bow-shot 
would reach the narrower. Once beyond them a 
man may carry his next drink with him till he 
reaches Cape Blanco on the west (where he may 
signal for one from a passing Union Castle boat) or 
the Karachi Club on the east. Say four thousand 
dry miles to the left hand and three thousand to 
the right. 

The weight of the Desert is on one, every day and 
every hour. At morning, when the cavalcade 
tramps along in the rear of the tulip-like dragoman, 
She says: "I am here — just beyond that ridge of 
pink sand that you are admiring. Come along, 
pretty gentleman, and I'll tell you your fortune/* 
But the dragoman says very clearly: "Please, sar, 
do not separate yourself at all from the main body," 
which, the Desert knows well, you had no thought 

280 



THE FACE OF THE DESERT 281 

of doing. At noon, when the stewards rummage 
out lunch-drinks from the dewy ice-chest, the Desert 
whines louder than the well-wheels on the bank: "I 
am here, only a quarter of a mile away. For mercy's 
sake, pretty gentleman, spare a mouthful of that 
prickly whisky-and-soda you are lifting to your 
lips. There's a white man a few hundred miles off, 
dying on my lap of thirst- — thirst that you cure with a 
rag dipped in lukewarm water while you hold him 
down with the one hand, and he thinks he is cursing 
you aloud, but he isn't, because his tongue is outside 
his mouth and he can't get it back. Thank you, 
my noble captain!" For naturally one tips half the 
drink over the rail with the ancient prayer: "'May 
it reach him who needs it," and turns one's back on 
the pulsing ridges and fluid horizons that are begin- 
ning their mid-day mirage-dance. 

At evening the Desert obtrudes again — tricked 
out as a Nautch girl in veils of purple, saffron, gold- 
tinsel, and grass-green. She postures shamelessly 
before the delighted tourists with woven skeins of 
homeward-flying pelicans, fringes of wild duck, black 
spotted on crimson, and cheap jewellery of opal 
clouds. "Notice Me!" She cries, like any other 
worthless woman. "Admire the play of My mobile 
features — the revelations of My multi-coloured soul! 
Observe My allurements and potentialities. Thrill 
while I stir you!" So She floats through all Her 
changes and retires upstage into the arms of the 



282 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

dusk. But at midnight She drops all pretence 
and bears down in Her natural shape, which depends 
upon the conscience of the beholder and his distance 
from the next white man. 

You will observe in the Benedicite Omnia Opera 
that the Desert is the sole thing not enjoined to 
" bless the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for 
ever." This is because when our illustrious father, 
the Lord Adam and his august consort, the Lady 
Eve, were expelled from Eden, Eblis the Accursed, 
fearful lest mankind should return ultimately to the 
favour of Allah, set himself to burn and lay waste 
all the lands east and west of Eden. 

Oddly enough, the Garden of Eden is almost 
the exact centre of all the world's deserts, counting 
from Gobi to Timbuctoo; and all that land qua land 
is "dismissed from the mercy of God." Those who 
use it do so at their own risk. Consequently the 
Desert produces her own type of man exactly as the 
sea does. I was fortunate enough to meet one 
sample, aged perhaps twenty-five. His work took 
him along the edge of the Red Sea, where men on 
swift camels come to smuggle hashish, and some- 
times guns, from dhows that put in to any convenient 
beach. These smugglers must be chased on still 
swifter camels, and since the wells are few and 
known, the game is to get ahead of them and occupy 
their drinking-places. 

But they may skip a well or so, and do several 



THE FACE OF THE DESERT 283 

days' march in one. Then their pursuer must take 
e'en greater risks and make crueller marches that 
the Law may be upheld. The one thing in the Law's 
favour is that hashish smells abominably — worse 
than a heated camel — so, when they range alongside, 
no time is lost in listening to lies. It was not told 
to me how they navigate themselves across the 
broken wastes, or by what arts they keep alive in the 
dust-storms and heat. That was taken for granted, 
and the man who took it so considered himself the 
most commonplace of mortals. He was deeply 
moved by the account of a new aerial route which 
the French are laying out somewhere in the Sahara 
over a waterless stretch of four hundred miles, where 
if the aeroplane is disabled between stations the 
pilot will most likely die and dry up beside it. To 
do the Desert justice, she rarely bothers to wipe out 
evidence of a kill. There are places in the Desert, 
men say, where even now you come across the dead 
of old battles, all as light as last year's wasps' nests, 
laid down in swathes or strung out in flight, with, 
here and there, the little sparkling lines of the emp- 
tied cartridge-cases that dropped them. 

There are valleys and ravines that the craziest 
smugglers do not care to refuge in at certain times 
of the year; as there are rest-houses where one's 
native servants will not stay because they are 
challenged on their way to the kitchen .by sentries 
of old Soudanese regiments which have long gone 



284 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

over to Paradise. And of voices and warnings 
and outcries behind rocks there is no end. These 
last arise from the fact that men very rarely live 
in a spot so utterly still that they can hear the 
murmuring race of the blood over their own ear- 
drums. Neither ship, prairie, nor forest gives that 
silence. I went out to find it once, when our steamer 
tied up and the rest of them had gone to see a sight, 
but I never dared venture more than a mile from our 
funnel-smoke. At that point I came upon a hill 
honey-combed with graves that held a multitude of 
paper-white skulls, all grinning cheerfully like am- 
bassadors of the Desert. But I did not accept their 
invitation. They had told me that all the little 
devils learn to draw in the Desert, which explains the 
elaborate and purposeless detail that fills it. None 
but devils could think of etching every rock outcrop 
with wind-lines, or skinning it down to its glistening 
nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the 
likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town- 
suburbs; of covering the space of half an English 
county with sepia studies of interlacing and recross- 
ing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition 
of much too clever perspective; and of wiping out the 
half-finished work with a wash of sand in three 
tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on the 
horizon's edge. This they do in order to make lost 
travellers think they can recognize landmarks and, 
run about identifying them till the madness comes. 



THE FACE OF THE DESERT 285 

The Desert is all devil-device— -as you might say 
"blasted cleverness 5 '— crammed with futile works, 
always promising something fresh round the next 
corner, always leading out through heaped decora- 
tion and over-insistent design into equal barrenness. 

There was a morning of mornings when we lay op- 
posite the rock-hewn Temple of Abu-Simbel, where 
four great figures, each sixty feet high, sit with their 
hands on their knees waiting for Judgment Day. 
At their feet is a little breadth of blue-green crop; 
they seem to hold back all the weight of the Desert 
behind them, which, none the less, lips over at one 
side in a cataract of vividest orange sand. The tour- 
ist is recommended to see the sunrise here, either 
from within the temple where it falls on a certain altar 
erected by Rameses in his own honour, or from with- 
out where another Power takes charge. 

The stars had paled when we began our watch; 
the river-birds were just whispering over their 
toilettes in the uncertain purplish light. Then 
the river dimmered up like pewter; the line of the 
ridge behind the Temple showed itself against 
a milkiness in the sky; one felt rather than saw 
that there were four figures in the pit of gloom below 
it. These blocked themselves out, huge enough, 
but without any special terror, while the glorious 
ritual of the Eastern dawn went forward. Some 
reed of the bank revealed itself by reflection, black on 
silver; arched wings flapped and jarred the still water 



286 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

to splintered glass; the desert ridge turned to topaz, 
and the four figures stood clear, yet without shadow- 
ing, from their background. The stronger light 
flooded them red from head to foot, and they became 
alive — as horridly and tensely yet blindly alive as 
pinioned men in the death-chair before the current 
is switched on. One felt that if by any miracle the 
dawn could be delayed a second longer, they would 
tear themselves free, and leap forth to heaven knows 
what sort of vengeance. But that instant the full 
sun pinned them in their places — nothing more than 
statues slashed with light and shadow — and another 
day got to work. 

A few yards to the left of the great images, close 
to the statue of an Egyptian princess, whose face 
was the very face of "She," there was a marble 
slab over the grave of an English officer killed in a 
fight against dervishes nearly a generation ago. 

From Abu Simbel to Wady Haifa the river, es- 
caped from the domination of the Pharaohs, begins 
to talk about dead white men. Thirty years ago, 
young English officers in India lied and intrigued 
furiously that they might be attached to expeditions 
whose bases were sometimes at Suakim, sometimes 
quite in the desert air, but all of whose deeds are 
now quite forgotten. Occasionally the dragoman, 
waving a smooth hand east or south-easterly, will 
speak of some fight. Then every one murmurs: 
"Oh yes. That was Gordon, of course/ 5 or "Was 



THE FACE OF THE DESERT 287 

that before or after Qmdurman?" But the river 
is much more precise. As the boat quarters the 
falling stream like a puzzled hound, all the old names 
spurt up again under the paddle-wheels — "Hicks' 
army — Val Baker — El Teb — Tokar — Tamai — Tara- 
nieb — and Osman Digna!" Her head swings round 
for another slant : " We cannot land English or Indian 
troops; if consulted, recommend abandonment of the 
Soudan within certain limits" That was my Lord 
Granville chirruping to the advisers of His Highness 
the Khedive, and the sentence comes back as crisp as 
when it first shocked one in '84. Next — here is a 
long reach between flooded palm trees — next, of 
course, comes Gordon — and a delightfully mad Irish 
war correspondent who was locked up with him in 
Khartoum, Gordon — eighty-four — eighty-five — the 
Suakim-Berber Railway really begun and quite as 
really abandoned. Korti — Abu Klea — the Desert 
Column — a steamer called the Safieh, not the Condor ', 
which rescued two other steamers wrecked on their 
way back from a Khartoum in the red hands of the 
Mahdi of those days. Then — the smooth glide over 
deep water continues — another Suakim expedition 
with a great deal of Osman Digna and renewed at- 
tempts to build the Suakim-Berber Railway. "Hash- 
in," say the paddle-wheels, slowing all of a sudden — 
"MacNeil's Zareba — the 15th Sikhs and another 
native regiment — Osman Digna in great pride and 
power, and Wady Haifa a frontier town. Tamai, 



288 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

once more; another siege of Suakim: Gemaifca; 
Handub; Trinkitat, and Tokar — 1887." 

The river recalls the names; the mind at once 
brings up the face and every trick of speech of some 
youth met for a few hours, maybe, in a train on the 
way to Egypt of the old days. Both name and face 
had utterly vanished from one's memory till then. 

It was another generation that picked up the 
ball ten years later and touched down in Khartoum. 
Several people aboard the Cook boat had been to 
that city. They all agreed that the hotel charges 
were very high, but that you could buy the most 
delightful curiosities in the native bazaar. But 
I do not like bazaars of the Egyptian kind, since 
a discovery I made at Assouan. There was an 
old man — a Mussulman — who pressed me to buy 
some truck or other, not with the villainous cama- 
raderie that generations of low-caste tourists have 
taught the people; nor yet with the cosmopolitan 
lighthandedness of appeal which the town-bred 
Egyptian picks up much too quickly; but with a 
certain desperate zeal, foreign to his whole creed and 
nature. He fingered, he implored, he fawned with 
an unsteady eye, and while I wondered I saw behind 
him the puffy pink face of a fezzed Jew, watching 
him as a stoat watches a rabbit. When he moved the 
Jew followed and took position at a commanding 
angle. The old man glanced from me to him and 
renewed his solicitations. So one could imagine 



THE FACE OF THE DESERT 289 

an elderly hare thumping wildly on a tambourine 
with the stoat behind him. They told me after- 
wards that Jews own most of the stalls in Assouan 
bazaar, the Mussulmans working for them, since 
tourists need Oriental colour. Never having seen or 
imagined a Jew coercing a Mussulman, this colour 
was new and displeasing to me. 



VII 
The Riddle of Empire 

At Halfa one feels the first breath of a frontier. 
Here the Egyptian Government retires into the 
background, and even the Cook steamer does not 
draw up in the exact centre of the postcard. At 
the telegraph-office, too, there are traces, diluted 
but quite recognizable, of military administration. 
Nor does the town, in any way or place whatever, 
smell — which is proof that it is not looked after 
on popular lines. There is nothing to see in it 
any more than there is in Hulk C. 60, late of her 
Majesty's troopship Himalaya, now a coal-hulk 
in the Hamoaze at Plymouth. A river-front, a 
narrow terraced river-walk of semi-oriental houses, 
barracks, a mosque, and half-a-dozen streets at 
right angles, the Desert racing up to the end of 
each, make all the town. A mile or so up stream 
under palm trees are bungalows of what must 
have been cantonments, some machinery repair- 
shops, and odds and ends of railway track. It is 
all as paltry a collection of whitewashed houses, 
pitiful gardens, dead walls, and trodden waste 
spaces as one would wish to find anywhere; and 

290 



THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE 291 

every bit of it quivers with the remembered life of 
armies and river-fleets, as the finger-bowl rings when 
the rubbing finger is lifted. The most unlikely men 
have done time there; stores by the thousand ton 
have been rolled and pushed and hauled up the 
banks by tens of thousands of scattered hands; hos- 
pitals have pitched themselves there, expanded enor- 
mously, shrivelled up and drifted away with the 
drifting regiments; railway sidings by the mile have 
been laid down and ripped up again, as the need 
changed, and utterly wiped out by the sand. 

Haifa has been the rail-head, Army Headquarters, 
and hub of a universe — the one place where a 
man could make sure of buying tobacco and sar- 
dines, or could hope for letters for himself and 
medical attendance for his friend. Now she is 
a little shrunken shell of a town without a proper 
hotel, where tourists hurry up from the river to 
buy complete sets of Soudan stamps at the Post 
Office. 

I went for a purposeless walk from one end of the 
place to the other, and found a crowd of native boys 
playing football on what might have been a parade- 
ground of old days. 

"And what school is that? 5 ' I asked in English 
of a small, eager youth. 

"Madrissah," said he most intelligently, which 
being translated means just "school." 

"Yes, but what school?" 



292 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

" Yes, Madrissah, school, sar," and he tagged after 
to see what else the imbecile wanted. 

A line of railway track, that must have fed big 
workshops in its time, led me between big-roomed 
houses and offices labelled departmentally, with 
here and there a clerk at work. I was directed and 
re-directed by polite Egyptian officials (I wished to 
get at a white officer if possible, but there wasn't 
one about); was turned out of a garden which be- 
longed to an Authority; hung round the gate of a 
bungalow with an old-established compound and two 
white men sitting in chairs on a verandah; wan- 
dered down towards the river under the palm trees, 
where the last red light came through; lost myself 
among rusty boilers and balks of timber; and at last 
loafed back in the twilight escorted by the small boy 
and an entire brigade of ghosts, not one of whom I 
had ever met before, but all of whom I knew most 
intimately. They said it was the evenings that 
used to depress them most, too; so they all came 
back after dinner and bore me company, while I 
went to meet a friend arriving by the night train 
from Khartoum. 

She was an hour late, and we spent it, the ghosts 
and I, in a brick-wallcd, tin-roofed shed, warm with 
the day's heat; a crowd of natives laughing and talk- 
ing somewhere behind in the darkness. We knew 
each other so well by that time, that we had finished 
discussing every conceivable topic of conversation — 



THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE 293 

the whereabouts of the Mahdi's head, for instance — - 



work, reward, despair, acknowledgment, flat failure, 
all the real motives that had driven us to do any- 
thing, and all our other longings. So we sat still and 
let the stars move, as men must do when they meet 
this kind of train. 

Presently I asked: "What is the name of the next 
station out from here?" 

"Station Number One," said a ghost. 

"And the next?" 

"Station Number Two, and so on to Eight, I 
think." 

"And wasn't it worth while to name even one 
of these stations for some man, living or dead, who 
had something to do with making the line?" 

"Well, they didn't, anyhow," said another ghost. 
"I suppose they didn't think it worth while. Why? 
What do you think?" 

"I think," I replied, "it is the sort of snobbery 
that nations go to Hades for." 

Her headlight showed at last, an immense distance 
off; the economic electrics were turned up, the ghosts 
vanished, the dragomans of the various steamers 
flowed forward in beautiful garments to meet their 
passengers who had booked passages in the Cook 
boats, and the Khartoum train decanted a joyous 
collection of folk, all decorated with horns, hoofs, 
skins, hides, knives, and assegais, which they had 
been buying at Omdurman. And when the porters 



294 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

laid hold upon their bristling bundles, it was like 
MacNeill's Zareba without the camels. 

Two young men in tarboushes were the only people 
who had no part in the riot. Said one of them to the 
other: 

"Hullo?" 

Said the other: " Hullo!" 

They grunted together for a while. Then one 
pleasantly: 

"Oh, Fm sorry for that ! I thought I was going 
to have you under me for a bit. Then you'll use the 
rest-house there?" 

"I suppose so," said the other. "Do you happen 
to know if the roofs on?" 

Here a woman wailed aloud for her dervish spear 
which had gone adrift, and I shall never know, ex- 
cept from the back pages of the Soudan Almanack, 
what state that rest-house there is in. 

The Soudan Administration, by the little I heard, 
is a queer service. It extends itself in silence from 
the edges of Abyssinia to the swamps of the Equator 
at an average pressure of one white man to several 
thousand square miles. It legislates according to 
the custom of the tribe where possible, and on the 
common sense of the moment when there is no pre- 
cedent. It is recruited almost wholly from the army, 
armed chiefly with binoculars, and enjoys a death- 
rate a little lower than its own reputation. It is said 
to be the only service in which a man taking leave 



THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE 295 

is explicitly recommended to get out of the country 
and rest himself that he may return the more fit to his 
job. A high standard of intelligence is required, and 
lapses are not overlooked. For instance, one man 
on leave in London took the wrong train from Bou- 
logne, and instead of going to Paris, which, of course, 
he had intended, found himself at a station called 
Kirk Kilissie or Adrianople West, where he stayed 
for some weeks. It was a mistake that might have 
happened to any one on a dark night after a stormy 
passage, but the authorities would not believe it, 
and when I left Egypt were busily engaged in boiling 
him in hot oil. They are grossly respectable in the 
Soudan now. 

Long and long ago, before even the Philippines 
were taken, a friend of mine was reprimanded by a 
British Member of Parliament, first for the sin of 
blood-guiltiness because he was by trade a soldier, 
next for murder because he had fought in great bat- 
tles, and lastly, and most important, because he and 
his fellow-braves had saddled the British taxpayer 
with the expense of the Soudan. My friend ex- 
plained that all the Soudan had ever cost the British 
taxpayer was the price of about one dozen of regula- 
tion Union Jacks — one for each province. "That," 
said the M.P. triumphantly, "is all it will ever be 
worth." He went on to justify himself, and the 
Soudan went on also. To-day it has taken its place 
as one of those accepted miracles which are worked 



296 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

without heat or headlines by men who do the job 
nearest their hand and seldom fuss about their repu- 
tations. 

But less than sixteen years ago the length and 
breadth of it was one crazy hell of murder, torture, 
and lust, where every man who had a sword used it 
till he met a stronger and became a slave. It was — 
men say who remember it — a hysteria of blood and 
fanaticism; and precisely as an hysterical woman is 
called to her senses by a dash of cold water, so at the 
battle of Omdurman the land was reduced to sanity 
by applied death on such a scale as the murderers 
and the torturers at their most unbridled could 
scarcely have dreamed. In a day and a night all 
who had power and authority were wiped out and 
put under till, as the old song says, no chief remained 
to ask after any follower. They had all charged 
into Paradise. The people who were left looked 
for renewed massacres of the sort they had been 
accustomed to, and when these did not come, they 
said helplessly: "We have nothing. We are nothing. 
Will you sell us into slavery among the Egyptians?" 
The men who remember the old days of the Recon- 
struction — which deserves an epic of its own — say 
that there was nothing left to build on, not even 
wreckage. Knowledge, decency, kinship, property, 
title, sense of possession had all gone. The people 
were told they were to sit still and obey orders; and 
they stared and fumbled like dazed crowds after an 



THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE 297 

explosion. Bit by bit, however, they were fed and 
watered and marshalled into some sort of order; 
set to tasks they never dreamed to see the end of; 
and, almost by physical force, pushed and hauled 
along the ways of mere life. They came to under- 
stand presently that they could reap what they had 
sown, and that man, even a woman, might walk for a 
day's journey with two goats and a native bedstead 
and live undespoiled. But they had to be taught 
kindergarten-fashion. 

And little by little, as they realised that the new 
order was sure and that their ancient oppressors 
were quite dead, there returned not only cultivators, 
craftsmen, and artisans, but outlandish men of war, 
scarred with old wounds and the generous dimples 
that the Martini-Henry bullet used to deal — fighting 
men on the lookout for new employ. They would 
hang about, first on one leg then on the other, 
proud or uneasily friendly, till some white officer 
circulated near by. And at his fourth or fifth pass- 
ing, brown and white having approved each other 
by eye, the talk — so men say — would run something 
like this: 

Officer {with air of sudden discovery). Oh, you 
by the hut, there, what is your business ? 

Warrior {at "attention" complicated by attempt 
to salute). I am So-and-So, son of So-and-So, from 
such and such a place. 

Officer. I hear. And ... ? 



298 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

Warrior (repeating salute). And a fighting man 
also. 

Officer (impersonally to horizon). But they all 
say that nowadays. 

Warrior (very loudly). But there is a man in 
one of your battalions who can testify to it. He is 
the grandson of my father's uncle. 

Officer (confidentially to his boots). Hell is quite 
full of such grandsons of just such father's uncles; 
and how do I know if Private So-and-So speaks 
the truth about his family. (Makes to go.) 

Warrior (swiftly removing necessary garments). 
Perhaps. But these don't lie. Look! I got this 
ten, twelve years ago when I was quite a lad, close 
to the old Border. Yes, Haifa. It was a true Snider 
bullet. Feel it! This little one on the leg I got at 
the big fight that finished it all last year. But I am 
not lame (violent leg-exercise), not in the least lame. 
See! I run. I jump. I kick. Praised be Allah! 

Officer. Praised be Allah! And then? 

Warrior (coquettishly). Then, I shoot. I am 
not a common spear-man. (Lapse into English.) 
Yeh, dam goo' shot! (pumps lever of imaginary 
Martini). 

Officer (unmoved). I see. And then? 

Warrior (indignantly). I am come here — after 
many days' marching. (Change to childlike wheedle.) 
Are all the regiments full ? 

At this point the relative, in uniform, generally 



THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE 299 

discovered himself, and if the officer liked the cut 
of his jib, another "old Mahdi's man" would be 
added to the machine that made itself as it rolled 
along. They dealt with situations in those days 
by the unclouded light of reason and a certain high 
and holy audacity. 

There is a tale of two Sheikhs shortly after the 
Reconstruction began. One of them, Abdullah 
of the River, prudent and the son of a slave-woman, 
professed loyalty to the English very early in the day, 
and used that loyalty as a cloak to lift camels from 
another Sheikh, Farid of the Desert, still at war with 
the English, but a perfect gentleman, which Abdul- 
lah was not. Naturally, Farid raided back on Ab- 
dullah's kine, Abdullah complained to the authori- 
ties, and the Border fermented. To Farid in his 
desert camp with a clutch of Abdullah's cattle round 
him, entered, alone and unarmed, the officer respon- 
sible for the peace of those parts. After compliments, 
for they had had dealings with each other before: 
"You've been driving Abdullah's stock again," said 
the Englishman. 

"I should think I had!" was the hot answer. 
"He lifts my camels and scuttles back into your 
territory, where he knows I can't follow him for 
the life; and when I try to get a bit of my own back, 
he whines to you. He's a cad — an utter cad." 

"At any rate, he is loyal. If you'd only come 
in and be loyal too, you'd both be on the same 



3 oo EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

footing, and then if he stole from you, he'd catch 
it!" 

"He'd never dare to steal except under your pro- 
tection. Give him what he'd have got in the Mah- 
di's time — a first-class flogging. You know he de- 
serves it!" 

"I'm afraid that isn't allowed. You have to 
let me shift all those bullocks of his back again." 

"And if I don't?" 

"Then, I shall have to ride back and collect all 
my men and begin war against you." 

"But what prevents my cutting your throat where 
you sit?" 

"For one thing, you aren't Abdullah, and " 

"There! You confess he's a cad!" 

"And for another, the Government would only 
send another officer who didn't understand your 
ways, and then there would be war, and no one 
would score except Abdullah. He'd steal your 
camels and get credit for it." 

"So he would, the scoundrel! This is a hard 
world for honest men. Now, you admit Abdul- 
lah is a cad. Listen to me, and I'll tell you a few 
more things about him. He was, etc., etc. He is, 
etc., etc." 

"You're perfectly right, Sheikh, but don't you 
see I can't tell him what I think of him so long 
as he's loyal and you're out against us? Now, if 
you come in I promise you that I'll give Abdullah 



THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE 301 

a telling-off — yes, in your presence — that will do 
you good to listen to." 

"No! I won't come in! But — I tell you what I 
will do. I'll accompany you to-morrow as your 
guest, understand, to your camp. Then you send 
for Abdullah, and if I judge that his fat face has 
been sufficiently blackened in my presence, Til think 
about coming in later." 

So it was arranged, and they slept out the rest 
of the night, side by side, and in the morning they 
gathered up and returned all Abdullah's cattle, and 
in the evening, in Farid's presence, Abdullah got 
the tongue-lashing of his wicked old life, and Farid 
of the Desert laughed and came in, and they all 
lived happy ever afterwards. 

Somewhere or other in the nearer provinces the 
old heady game must be going on still, but the Sou- 
dan proper has settled to civilisation of the brick- 
bungalow and bougainvillea sort, and there is a 
huge technical college where the young men are 
trained to become fitters, surveyors, draftsmen, and 
telegraph employees at fabulous wages. In due 
time, they will forget how warily their fathers had 
to walk in the Mahdi's time to secure even half a 
bellyful. Then, as has happened elsewhere, they 
will honestly believe that they themselves originally 
created and since then have upheld the easy life 
into which they were bought at so heavy a price. 
Then the demand will go up for "extension of local 



3 o2 EGYPT OF THE MAGICIANS 

government," "Soudan for the Soudanese," and so 
on till the whole cycle has to be retrodden. It is a 
hard law but an old one — Rome died learning it, 
as our western civilisation may die — that if you 
give any man anything that he has not painfully 
earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his 
descendants your devoted enemies. 



THE END 




THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY. N. Y* 



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